Transitions

Transitions of any kind can be hard. After all, we work diligently to secure and surround ourselves with the familiar and that which makes us feel comfortable and safe. So why change if we don’t have to? Why create the need for change? For a variety of reasons I may be predisposed to being distrustful of a “safe” life with a “secure” future, but I do know that dealing with transitions goes better with practice.

So, I consider that when there are choices to be made (what to eat, which job to apply for, whether or not to get out of bed), there is no truly “bad” choice, and I think it is better to choose and accept where that choice leads, rather than do nothing. I leave myself the option to change my mind, but at least I have made a step forward from where I was before I made a decision. And many times I have watched myself choose the seemingly more difficult route.

There were many choices over decades that I believe led to my Fulbright-Nehru grant and my upcoming trip to India. And I am equally intrigued and cautioned by how I will handle being away from the familiar for half a year. I assure myself that at least I will be working in a field that I know well, though my task is to look with an open mind at the teaching and practice of dance in the Indian academies where I will be, hopefully finding mutual, critical connections and expansions of the Euro-centric forms I know and the Eastern Indian forms with which I am not familiar.

Some transitions are ones over which we have little choice or human control. And here, I am talking about facing our mortality. Yet within our own lives we must deal with the death of our friends and family, and learn to manage how our lives might differ without that close relationship. Last night I received news that a close friend of almost twenty years had lost his battle with cancer, and I am mourning my loss alongside his family and other friends. We had never lived in the same country. We communicated by postcards, snail-mail, telephone, email, social media and any means available to us, and there was rarely a month went by that we did not exchange some tidbit of life.

As I mentioned in my last post, a caring exchange with another person is important to me, and I have not always relied on only those I can physically hold or see. Even though I am only half way through my fifties, my address book is half filled with friends and family that are no longer alive. And I pride myself that these humans who have so enriched my life are spread around the world, and that I have met them all in person at some point, even if I will never meet them in the flesh again.

So “keeping in touch” still seems like a good reason for this blog.

Thank you Nigel Boyes for sharing so much beauty in this world with me.