Last weekend I celebrated three years of teaching Jazzercise. Three years. Wow.<\/p>\n
It is roughly the same amount of time I\u2019ve been living in California and\u00a0working at Stanford. Moving here was one of the hardest things we\u2019ve ever done\u2014we\u00a0were nearly broke, separated as a family for 8 months, and we struggled to settle in to the culture of the Bay Area.\u00a0In many ways, Jazzercise was a saving grace. Dancing became solace and the Jazzercise community became my community and my friends.<\/p>\n
Dance has become my story, my narrative of the\u00a0last three years.<\/p>\n
Dance as courage.<\/b>\u00a0To not just join the dance,\u00a0as they say, but to dance when no one else is dancing. Courage to unabashedly dance to a rhythm that no one else dances to. Courage to dance an unpopular dance.<\/p>\n
Dance as vulnerability.<\/b> To dance in a way that people truly know what you are about, what you care about\u2026a genuine true-to-self kind of dance. To embrace vulnerability is to close your eyes and not worry whether people are watching you dance, or what they are thinking, or whether they are laughing.<\/p>\n
Dance as care.<\/b> To love and be love because you are you. To love others because they are themselves. To find kindred spirits.\u00a0Opening your arms and embracing the ones you love. Dancing through life\u2019s ups and downs with them, sometimes laughing, sometimes\u00a0crying, but always there with them, sometimes in body, always in spirit.<\/p>\n
I don’t always dance like this. But I try.\u00a0Now I\u2019m facing a new dance.<\/p>\n
Dance as a leap of faith.<\/b> To dance a new dance. To be willing to take a risk, try\u00a0a\u00a0new opportunity, step out onto a new dance floor, lights blazing on you as you look for a\u00a0familiar face in the crowd. I am so grateful that\u00a0I don\u2019t have to do this alone.\u00a0Now I want to share with all of you where the dance is taking me and my family.<\/p>\n
In June, we are moving to Middlebury, Vermont, where I will be the new Associate Provost for Digital Learning at Middlebury College. In this position, I will build a team to help craft and support Middleburg\u2019s digital learning strategy. After getting to know their amazing Provost, Susan Baldridge, and meeting faculty and staff, I knew that Middlebury was the right place for starting a new dance.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m excited and a little overwhelmed by this opportunity. I keep reminding myself to breathe, to take a step back, and to listen for the little music inside me. Do you know that music? It\u2019s the music you hear when you close your eyes, and you calm the roaring crowds of self doubt, and you listen. And then you start to sway and feel the music move you right to left and left to right.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been reminding myself of what my favorite author, Anne Lamott, writes\u00a0about dance (though here, she is talking about writing a first draft of a\u00a0manuscript, I think it applies more broadly):<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cYou get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.\u201d \u00a0— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life<\/em><\/p>\n Just dance. Three\u2026two\u2026one\u2026here we go.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last weekend I celebrated three years of teaching Jazzercise. Three years. Wow. It is roughly the same amount…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[98,100,99],"class_list":["post-875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-happy-life","tag-announcement","tag-dance","tag-new-job","content-wrap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=875"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":880,"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875\/revisions\/880"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redpincushion.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}