I used to enjoy dance as a child, not sure what attracted me to that, but I think it felt like a way to channelize my energies and garner everyone’s attention around. I was in a school which encouraged all-round activities, and dance form used to be greatly appreciated by teachers. Dance also helped me spend time outside of classes rehearsing with my friends for various cultural events in the school.

After 6th grade, we moved to a different place and the school was completely focused on academics and no one really bothered about cultural activities. It was all about grades and exams. This continued till 12th grade and things changed drastically after I joined college. In college, it felt like going back to my 6th grade school where all cultural activities are equally encouraged. But there is something that stopped me from dancing in my college: –

1. Social fear – In college, students used to hoot and make fun of almost everyone on the stage. Now I feel silly on why that worried me the most, but as a teen that was my biggest cause of worry.

2. Stage fear – After a lot of gap, it felt terrifying to dance in front of a huge crowd and therefore I gave up the idea of dancing or any kind of activity related to stage. I don’t know when I turned shy, but I felt less confident being on stage and facing a big group of people.

After college, I joined a corporate company as a software engineer and life just moved on quickly. After 8 years of work, I finally got a chance to learn dance as a hobby. It was a classical Indian dance(Kathak) and I was okay learning any dance and I didn’t take much time to join the classes. At that point of time, dance felt like a great way to get rid of stress and like a good form of physical activity.

First step is the most difficult one and I managed to take that step after a long break. As I started learning dance, my teacher pointed out few consistent mistakes in my dance, which I felt very funny and I thought are related to me being a software engineer:-

1. Digital vs Analog – As a software engineer or someone who studied logic, mathematics etc, my brain got used to processing information in step by step format:

Step1: System.out.println(“Hello “); Step2: System.out.println(“Name”);

All the code that I write on a daily basis happens step by step and that reflected in my dance too. Though we have steps in dance, there should be continuity in the moves without any breaks and my step by step processing made my dance more digital 😛

2. Fingers Closed – Dance should have fingers closed or kept together to make the moves right. When my teacher told me about this initially that I keep my fingers open, I wondered why this is happening with me all the time and later I realized the culprit is my computer typing habit where I keep my fingers at a distance all the time and that’s making my life tough with closing the fingers and keeping them intact. My teacher explained me that energy will be lost if fingers are kept open and I wondered what’s happening to me during typing the whole day 😀

3. Practice – I am good at remembering dance moves, but the minute I remember all the steps, I feel that my practice is over. Just like when we crack a piece of code, the work is over. We don’t need to do it multiple times to get it right. That’s exactly how I used to process the dance as well. But I slowly realized that any form of art requires constant practice to get to the level of perfection and this part is so tough to explain to my brain that I need to push myself regularly to do some practice.

Reflecting on these problems made me wonder how our body and personality are shaped with the kind of work we do and how difficult it is to change it.

Did anyone of you face similar situations in your life? Let me know 🙂