who put their tao in my blues?
For about the past six months I’ve been doing lots of blues dancing. It’s been a great experience; it’s good to get back to simply moving after years spent mostly coding or studying.
During the best nights of blues dancing I notice that my mind is quite clear, and my place in the world is blindingly obvious. The best dances are thoroughly an experience of flow, or what I also think of as tao. Every movement melts smoothly into the next, punctuated crisply by the beat and other aspects of the music. Self, thought, and decision making absolutely melt away. I’m sure this is part of why I constantly end up thinking of the tao and philosophy in breaks between dances; I’m experiencing it first hand one song at a time.
what is flow?
For a slightly technical description, check this section of the wikipedia article on flow. For my common sense interpretation, keep reading, or feel free to skip to the meat of the post in the next section if you’re familiar with this.
Flow is experienced when one’s abilities and challenges are appropriately matched. But what is flow? Flow is where you forget about yourself, time flies by, and perhaps you feel euphoric. According Flow, by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (say that three times fast!), flow is one of the key elements to living a fulfilled life. The book includes examples from maintenance workers at factories to high level professionals to a vagrant in Italy who live fulfilled lives as a result of their maintaining a sense of flow.
flow is tao
As I said, flow happens when abilities and challenges are matched. When one attempts something too far beyond one’s abilities, this is ambition and seeking. You can’t find the tao by looking for it. You can’t reach “enlightenment” by trying to get there, and you can’t progress as a dancer by trying too hard to get there. You always have to work from where you are right now, and when you start, where you are is not one step away from being an amazing dancer.
On the flip side, boredom comes from not challenging yourself. I suppose you could try to avoid having a shitty life, or a shitty time dancing, by never doing anything new, but that just seems silly. Everything ends up predictable, and eventually it gets rigid and boring. No longer is your dance, or your life, an expression of who you are. Boredom comes from fear and insincerity.
the tao in blues
“The great Tao flows unobstructed in every direction.”, the Tao Te Ching says. Great dances flow unobstructed just the same, however constrained we are by having bodies, pesky things that they are. The great mistake for a dancer is to only see the dance as a fun time, something corporeal and enjoyable, but not spiritual and instructional. In life one should flow from one situation to the next, just as while dancing one should flow from one position to the next.
The dance doesn’t start with one’s body, but with one’s mind. Initially one must move deliberately and with full conscious control of every aspect. The dance is overwhelming as one has not begun to notice patterns, and thus is overwhelmed by irrelevant details. On top of this, the beginning dancer’s mind, I suspect, is racing, full of worries about what they are doing “wrong” or what they “should be doing”. This is unavoidable, but must be overcome. To progress as a dancer, one must begin to clear one’s mind of each worry, analysis, and emotion that is a hindrance. As one’s mind becomes unobstructed, one is free to pay attention to their body as it is in this moment.
Once the mind begins to acquiesce, the body is the next playground. I have noticed recently that I tend to put weight onto the outside of my right foot when stepping to the right; if the follow also shifts her center of gravity a fair bit to the right, I can start to fall over. It’s also obviously not good to be shifting weight onto a rolled ankle. These sorts of things are what the dance is all about now. This is not an analytical process, it is thoroughly analog, to stretch the term. In paying attention to one’s body, how one’s momentum changes, aches intensify or ease up, and where each part of you is, you naturally assimilate the important patterns.
Why does this matter? It’s an immediately available, experiential example of the most important lesson in life. The great big one, that I can’t put in words, but merely crudely point to, hoping you can make your way over there on your own, that you don’t get distracted by something shiny on the way. Following the tao starts in your head too, you have to stop worrying about what you’re doing “wrong”, what you “should be doing”, you have to clear your mind of useless opposites and distinctions. As you manage to do this, you are free to be mindful of the analog of your body in any given situation. Whether that be the finer technical points of what your workflow should be when starting a new programming project, or how to manage your schedule, or what have you. Of course, in life, as in dancing, the progression is much more complex than this. One clears one’s mind and comes back to flow and presence repeatedly, uncovering layers.
The point is this: don’t miss out on the bigger lesson that your art is trying to teach you; the same lessons are available while programming, making music, or anything else. Your art is trying to teach you how to live, and if you let it, it will.