Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [73]
By the end of the evening no one in the group had any defenses left. We were all quite willing to make fools of ourselves by performing, under Barry’s instructions, some of the dances from Saturday Night Fever.
Standing next to one another in a straight line, we danced to the sound of the Bee Gees singing “Stayin’ Alive …” I moved from side to side, first lifting one arm up toward the ceiling, index finger pointed; then swinging the same arm down across my body, I pointed to the floor. Just like John Travolta. Minus the white suit, of course.
We repeated this dance several times. The music grew louder and the room warmer. Perspiration dripped down my back and my hair stuck to my neck in a clump; I was sure my makeup had melted into an unflattering Phantom of the Opera look. But I didn’t care. And I didn’t care that the music was corny and the dancing hopelessly unhip. This was not about being hip; it was about having fun. Pure, sheer, unabashed fun.
Why, I wondered, couldn’t I feel this way more often? The answer, I decided, was that having fun isn’t really what most of us do best. What most of us do best is work and worry. Often we combine the two into one consuming preoccupation: worrying about work. Are we doing a good job? Where do we stack up in terms of our colleagues? Do we work hard enough? Do we work too hard? And how can we do what it takes to have a successful career without sacrificing family life?
Worrying about children is high on the list, too. And it makes no difference, as I well knew, whether the children are three or thirty. A child is a child is a child. At least in the eyes of a parent.
Most of us are also quite skilled at worrying about money, about relationships, about our looks, about our health, and about weather. Worrying about weather seems to have become a national pastime. At least that’s the impression given by the number of television hours given over to discussing rain, snow, heat, humidity, wind chill, barometric pressure, and jet streams of air arriving from somewhere or another.
I found myself trying to figure out how much of my life had been consumed by worrying. If totaled up in years, what would it amount to? One year? Five? Ten? Whatever the figure, it was too high.
I once read an article on the psychoanalysis of worry. In it a British psychoanalyst, a man named Adam Phillips, expressed his view that worrying is an attempt by the worrier to simplify his life. “… specific worries,” he wrote, “can be reassuring because they preempt what is in actuality an unknowable future.”
It made sense to me. Is there anything we dread more than an unknowable future? And is there anything more likely to obscure our fear of this unpredictable future than the act of worrying? If we worry about weather or a bad haircut, for instance, we are relieved of the need to worry that something terrible may be waiting around the corner, ready to ambush us.
But worrying, I found, was quite a difficult thing to do while dancing the quickstep with Barry. Having fun was not.
Later, walking home in the moist night air, the domes and spires of Oxford stabbing the dark-blue sky above, I felt completely relaxed and carefree. I glanced at my watch; it was nearly midnight. The lateness of the hour surprised me. Then I realized that while dancing with Barry and the others I’d not been measuring time. I’d been living it.
When I got back to my rooms at Brasenose, I took out my journal and began writing down my feelings about Barry and the way dancing made me happy and carefree. Then I started to think it wasn’t dancing that made me feel that way; it was giving myself up to dancing. I wasn’t used to doing that, throwing myself so completely into something that had no definable goal. Or at least I hadn’t done it for a long time.
Still, it wasn’t hard to remember how as a