Things the Floor Teaches You That the Rest of Life Doesn't

For some, dance is exercise. For others, therapy or rehab. For many of us, it's a way to connect with wonderful people from all walks of life.

But dance is also something else: It's a teacher.

An incomplete list of things the floor teaches you

1. Showing up is already the hard part.

Most people who want to dance never start. Most people who start quit before it gets good. The ones who stay figure out pretty quickly that walking through the door (probably nervous, alone, knowing nobody) is most of the work. The rest is just music and time.

Walking in is the whole audition.

And that translates pretty well to the rest of life. Most of us have no lack of ambition, but starting is usually the hard part.
Just walk in! Start!

2. Mistakes don't end the dance.

You step on a foot. You blank on the pattern. You miss a lead so completely that your partner briefly wonders whether you're mentally all there... And then the song... keeps going.

Nobody stops, nobody makes it weird. C'est la vie, that's life, the dance keeps going!

The floor has this incredibly generous way of teaching you that a stumble is not the end of the world. It's not a verdict on you as a human being, nor a reason to quit. It's just a thing you move through, ideally somewhere near the beat.

(As an aside: this is also true of email, taxes, and (I presume) parenting. Nobody sets those to a rumba though, which I consider an oversight on the part of the universe.)

3. You find out what "present" actually feels like.

Not put-your-phone-in-the-other-room present, I'm talking the real thing: the music is the only object in the universe, your body is doing something it already knows how to do, and your brain finally, mercifully, shuts up.

Do you know how rare that is? Do you know what people pay for it? There are apps. There are retreats. There is an entire industry built on renting you ten minutes of the exact thing a stranger will hand you for free on a Wednesday night in a rented studio with bad parking.

Social dancing is basically meditation with better shoes.

4. Strangers can become a part of your dance family.

You've never met this person before, likely. Then the music starts and something happens that can be hard to explain to anybody who hasn't felt it: a whole conversation with no words in it, a trust that materializes out of nothing, built on mutual respect and a desire to connect with both humanity and music.

You might never dance with them again, or they might become the person you call when you're gone for the weekend and need someone to look in on your cat.

Heck, some of us get married!

Your results will vary, but the people you meet along the way often make the whole dance journey worth it.

5. You learn to trust your body.

For a lot of people, the floor is the first place they stop watching themselves and start feeling. You quit asking "do I look weird" and start asking "does this feel right."

Reconnecting with your body and how things flow is a powerful tool, and it often seeps beyond the dance floor and into the rest of your life. It shows up in how you sit in a meeting, how you walk down the aisle in a grocery store (rumba walks, anyone?!), whether you apologize for existing when someone bumps intoyou, etc.

6. Joy doesn't need a reason.

It needs a beat, and somebody willing to share the floor with you. That's the entire list of requirements. I've checked.

Okay, here's the upshot

Everything that scares you out in the world is also here in dance, but it's just scaled down and set to music.

Fear of looking dumb in front of strangers? Every single night.

Recovering from a mistake in public without falling apart? Constant.

Trusting somebody you just met, on almost no evidence? That's the whole activity.

Being fully in your body instead of narrating yourself from six feet above your own head? Required equipment.

I started Feather Three for people who get this: not necessarily the people who dance to perform, but the people who dance because something in them needs it. Because three minutes on the floor gives them a thing the other 10,077 minutes of the week don't.

If you're not one of those people yet? The floor's open, the parking is bad (probably), and somebody in there is going to ask you to dance. You might just have fun. :)

So: what did the floor teach you that nothing else did?

I'll see you out on the floor!

Joel Torgeson, Founder and Lead Designer