Learningto Fall

Or the Illusion of Control

Or Finding Our Way through Disorientation

Go to any airport gate where they’ve just announced that the flight will be delayed, and you’ll see a whole host of responses: anger, frustration, indifference, relief (I had the pleasure of experiencing this recently). What a perfect study on responses to unforeseen change. I might argue that all of these responses are also a confrontation of realizing you’re not in control. Surprise! Despite all of your best plans, your careful calculations, one snowflake can redirect your entire itinerary. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the illusion of control, and how that plays out in different people and relationships in my circle. For many people (and for me), it’s a matter of knowing that makes them feel in control: “Please give me this information so that I can rest easy.” Having information helps us sort our lives and feel that we can reign in the potential chaos, just a little bit. But at the heart of it, we’re not in control. Despite all of our reasoning and our best laid plans, at any moment, something small (or huge) can send us in an entirely unexpected direction. How is anyone to cope?

I’ve been trying to write around this topic for a few weeks now, ever since one of my regular dance class attendees mentioned that an earlier blog post reminded her of one of my dance class “soap box” moments about falling fully; during which, I may have gently redirected her weight/pushed her over (safely!). 

See, I have a thing about falling and exploring the moments of disorientation you can find through contemporary dance. It’s happened more than once where I’ve been directing a dance class (or after watching a performance) that I get on some diatribe about the relationship with gravity not being believable. In those moments, what I’m asking for from students is an effort to truly experience being off balance, and then finding their way back to balance. A tall order, right? 

On the one hand, I think I just enjoy the physical challenge of this task, but on a deeper, more philosophical level, I think there’s a valuable lesson to explore: if you practice being disoriented in a predicted/controlled environment, does it make unforeseen change easier to deal with? 

If you couldn’t tell, I think it does. To put it in a dance context: When I have new people with dance experience take my class, much of the time, their prior dance experiences have been based in ballet, a dance form where verticality reigns supreme. Head over shoulders over hips over feet please! No mis-alignment here! While this training can be very valuable (and do wonders for the posture) there is a whole range of dynamic physical (and especially spinal) experiences that this training misses (in my opinion). One such experience is being intentionally off-balance or disoriented. In ballet, once you’ve understood how to safely perform a leap, a turn, and standing on one foot, the same rules can apply for much of the other choreography you’ll be exploring. 

A waterfall in Washington state on a beautiful July afternoon.

There is definitely value in that training, but what has drawn me to to modern/contemporary dance instead is the freedom to explore movements that are far less definable. Movements that might keep you standing upright or might take you upside down, or move you from one to the other without much time to transition. Movements that continue to push you to explore the boundaries of your own comfort zone. You’re dancing a combination, and you know there’s a movement coming up where you have to swirl your head and turn around. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but you’re practicing being disoriented and learning how to become oriented in the chaos. For me, this training feels integral to learning how to respond to unforeseen changes in your life. 

To zoom out again, away from the dance studio, everyone deals with this on some level, with varying degrees of success. Each new day comes with expectations, surprises, and our responses to them. All we can do is continue to practice setting expectations and responding to the ways that they are met or not. So, I’ll leave you with directions I might give in the dance studio if you’re struggling to fall & re-orient: trust yourself; your body is smarter than you realize; and if it’s not working, try leading with something else.