Willingness to Try Again and Again is Naturally Inspiring

April 26, 2015

The Boston Globe

In my head I am graceful, a lithe thing, long arms and legs that are fluid yet firm. A natural dancer.

In reality, when I signed up to be part of a flash mob a few years ago, the director, seeing me dance, took me aside and said, "Maybe you'd like to be our photographer?"

I took dancing lessons when I was 8 along with every other little girl in my neighborhood. Come recital time, I was "chosen" to be the rose around which the petals (all the other children) danced. I was thrilled. My job, said my teacher, bending down so that we were eye to eye, was to stand perfectly still and smile.

And that's what I did. I stood still and smiled.

One might say that the writing was on the wall then. But I was a kid and read the writing as "Congratulations! You're such a good dancer you don't have to dance!" Not as, "Move a single muscle and you'll ruin the show." In my head, I have always been Anna gliding along with the King of Siam.

And when my mother didn't sign me up for classes when I was 9? I didn't think about it. Apparently she and my dance teacher did something right (or wrong!) because it never occurred to me that I couldn't dance.

As I grew older, it became clear that maybe lithe and graceful weren't the exact words you would use to describe me. "You could never be a cat burglar," my father used to say. "They'd hear you coming a mile away." He said I thumped when I walked. I tripped over my own feet sometimes, too. I had a Band-Aid on my elbow the day I got married.

When my daughters were teenagers, they told me my feet went one way and my arms went another. They laughed and said, "Mom! You really cannot dance!"

I refused to believe them.

A few weeks ago after a hiatus of about a year I went back to the gym. I stretched, lifted weights, walked on the treadmill. My usual routine. It was uninspiring.

So I took my first fitness class.

In the class are wall-to-wall mirrors. I could see from the start that when everyone in the class was moving to the left, I was moving to the right. And when everyone had her arms up, mine were down. Or to the side. Or where they didn't belong. And as for the beat? As for keeping up with the music? I couldn't.

"Go at your own pace," the instructor told me.

I returned the next day. And the next. And watched myself flailing, failing, one time even falling. I could not keep up, not with the music and not with any of the moves in any of the classes. And I thought, maybe this isn't for me.

Epiphanies come when you least expect them. My granddaughter Lucy loves to sing. She's 11 and knows the words to every song from "Annie" and "Frozen" and "Gypsy" and "Into the Woods." She dresses up like Annie and Elsa and Gypsy Rose Lee, long white gloves and all. And, when she sings, in her head, she is Annie and Elsa and Gypsy Rose Lee and Little Red.

In reality, Lucy has Down syndrome, which means she has low muscle tone and has to work extra hard to get the muscles in her mouth to form words clearly. Often it's hard to understand her even when she's singing.

But she sings anyway. She doesn't slump away and say, I can't do that. She sings out with joy and enthusiasm, and I wonder, as I struggle for a single hour in an optional exercise class, what propels this child? What infuses her every day, 24 hours a day, no option here, with such tenacity? "Try again," is what she says out loud every time she doesn't get something right."Try again."

I watch myself in the mirror now, not keeping up, feet floundering, arms awry, and I think not of the King of Siam anymore, but of Lucy. "Try again," I hear her say.

And because of her, I do.