Dancing and Baby Steps

Baby M, who turned nine yesterday, so she is not really anybody's baby except mine, got roller skates for her birthday. She is Over The Moon. They are pinkish purplish and fabulous. She and her brother had a great plan for the morning, this first day of Thanksgiving break: skate to the park. Except for one glaring oversight. Baby girl doesn't know how to skate. She sees her brother, Bam, who has been skating for a while now, skate up and down our death defying hill with ease. She thought that skating would come easily to her. She fell. And fell and fell in the kitchen. After a bad tumble where she cracked her head on the tile, she sobbed and sobbed and said it was too hard and she was too scared. I suggested she put on her bike helmet and stay in the kitchen for a while, that maybe the path to the park, with its glaring absence of walls, was too advanced just yet. Eventually M agreed and is now happily spider walking her skates from wall to table to wall in the kitchen. But every so often she goes onto the family room carpet to do her 'routine:' a wonderful bit of spins and dancing that the higher friction carpet allows her to execute safely.

She really likes to dance. Her soul has always soared with a wicked beat. Her skirts must always be spinny; she can barely abide pants, preferring leggings and avoiding the constrictions of jeans at almost all costs. I rarely even buy pants for her, as a result. When she was little, she would screech and scream until she could peel off the offending pants. Anything that diminishes her movement is to be avoided. So, of course she was drawn to skates and their increased capacity for soaring. She just didn't account for the learning curve. We rarely do. Baby steps are aggravatingly slow. Our spirits know how to soar. It's our bodies that have to learn the muscle movements at a protracted pace. But the blessing here is that our muscles have their own memories. If we teach our bodies well, even at the aggravatingly slow pace they require, our bodies develop muscle memories, our brains carve neural pathways so that the soaring dancing and skating, once learned, become hard wired and easy, even when not practiced consistently. Like riding a bike, you only need to learn once and then your muscles will take over, reminding you of old lessons learned.

Suffering great stress and trauma can often seem like an actual brain injury. Tasks that 'should' be easy, suddenly seem insurmountable. In such times, when the floors of life are too slippery and there are not enough walls to hold us up on the open road, we would do well to go back to the carpet with its higher friction, if only for a rejuvenating moment. We need to go back to the baby steps, take things in increasingly small chunks--smaller and smaller until we can breathe again.

It's hard to stay in the kitchen when we want to go to the park. It's hard to crawl when we long to dance. But baby stepping leads to dancing. Patience wins the day. Every time.