I think it must be the lesson of my life, because it comes back, time and time again, in different forms with different faces.
If you've been reading my blog, you know what's been going on for the past two months: fits of drama, stress, and anger. I had in my head a vision of working with technically trained dancers who care about their craft, in a company where everything goes right all the time and everyone gives me what they're supposed to. Where expectations are clearly laid out, people take responsibility for what they're responsible for, and I'm not the one who takes the fall if that doesn't happen.
And that's just not the reality. The reality is the essentially the opposite, and the drama has come about because I just got angry with this fact. I fought it and I fell into vicious cycles that repeat and fall deeper into themselves, and spiral down into bad energy, constant stress, and really just not good health.
I can't change the reality. I can't change what I'm given. I can't change the company. The only thing I can do is change how I look at it and how I do what I do.
And so that's what I'm going to do. Starting here, not getting music on time, getting the wrong music, dancers wanting to leave early or butting in with suggestions for what would be better, being under a microscope and judged as inadequate, that's normal. That is the world. My work is what to do inside of it. How do you prepare for everything to go wrong?
I don't know yet. But I do know that the anger is stopping right now. The stress is stopping. The fighting is stopping. What is given is given. What's on my plate is not what I thought I was getting, but that's the way it is. Fighting over the fact that I was supposed to get chicken is taking the time away from the essential.
I've been so busy worrying about the extra stuff that I haven't had time or energy to focus on that essential: creating dance. Thinking of new varieties of movements, tempos, spacing, energy, etc. Instead, I've been in the constant energy of "everything is wrong and I can't work like this." No. Everything is not wrong, it is the way it is.
If it turns out that me and the company are incompatible, then so be it. If it turns out that our energies and expectations simply do not match and cannot be made to do so, then so be it.
So here I am. I have two choices: continue in the drama cycle, fight, be angry, be unwell, or change how I look at things and go forward without all that on my shoulders and focus on the only things that I can change and control. Doesn't seem like much of a choice to me, when put like that.
I don't know what, if anything, it might change. I know that if I make this change with the expectation that it will cause something -- anything -- to happen, then I'm not really making it, and just propagating the same cycles of drama. And so I don't expect anything. I only know that I can't go on the same way. So if the only thing I can change is me, that's already something.
Starting now, what was "wrong" is normal, and inside it, I am perfectly calm, I do what I can, and I don't spend time fighting ghosts.
I guess we'll see what happens.
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