Yesterday, early in the morning, I wrote a message the guy whom I was recommended "Hey, your friend Miguel Ángel passed along your contact for dancing lessons", and we worked out to meet up the same day at the park, if it wasn't raining. It didn't rain. I biked there, passing under the Arc de Triomf as a spiritual follow up to what happened the day before.
We met at the base of the statue of General Prim for our lesson. He asked me where I was and what I wanted to learn.
I explained: I've never taken dancing lessons. I didn't really even dance, I started dancing on my own, intuitively a year ago, but now I feel compelled to learn to dance because I want to do it with other people, and to dance with others you must share a common movement pattern. He assented vigorously at this statement.
He explained: the first thing I teach my students is to be able to follow the times, the rhythm. "If you don't do that, your dance will look horrible". I assented vigorously at this statement. In the very few dancing lessons I've taken in my life, I've seen in the mirror how being out of sync looks wrong and feels wrong.
So we stepped into the shade of the statue and begun our lesson. He showed me the three basic steps of Cuban salsa, along with two turns. The guy was a very good teacher, a native from Cuba who worked as a dancer, with this overflowing energy that Cubans and dancers have, rolled into one.
I think I did OK. At times, I could feel the flow of dance, when you can stop thinking about how you should move your body and instead you let your body do its thing. Salsa has a particular pattern which includes pauses within the times, and once you get a hang of it your body knows when it steps out of sync. Other times, as I was thinking too much, I fell out of sync. The teacher brought me back into rhythm by pausing and then accentuating the first reintroduction step.
At the end of class the teacher asked me if I had any questions. Since he was teaching me Cuban salsa I was concerned I was getting into a variant which would impede me dancing at most venues, but he reassured me Cuban salsa was the most popular variant. I told him I would practice what we did at home, and I went back home passing under the arch again.
I see that, if I wish for success at work and at dance, I will have to write daily about it. My work logs will go to an internal company Notion, so nothing will be written about work, while my dancing endeavours shall go into exploration.work.