schools of life

We’re really not equipped, as a society and as individuals, to deal with ourselves and with life.

We have to pick up the lessons along the way: from our own mistakes (sometimes), from those same mistakes repeated dozens of times (a lot more often), from other people’s mistakes (rarely) and from other people’s advice (even more rarely). So many of these things could be learnt in a systematic way and the benefit would be immense. Yet such schools and courses, even when they exist, are still hidden from most of us.

I remember, for instance, when I started tango. Even though I had all the right circumstances for learning it (more on that soon), I still had so many challenges I had to fumble through and eventually overcome – my first milongas always come to mind, where everything is new and scary (and magical): even though your teachers tell you what to expect and do, once you’re there you are, for some time, pretty lost on how to invite whom for a dance, how to deal with getting and not getting praise, why you suddenly forget everything you know when you enter the ronda… Even in the tango classes themselves, where the atmosphere was great, you still had so many personal challenges where later on I wondered why I didn’t overcome them more easily, or why they were a challenge at all.

These experiences are so typical, they’re almost textbook material, and we’re all told about them, in tango as well as in many other parts of life. And yet, we’ve simply haven’t learned to trust and truly implement the experience of others and we haven’t been taught how to deal with the inevitable bumps along the way.

Some 8-9 months after starting tango, I also took up kick-boxing as a side activity, where I could do some really vigorous exercise. Though the classes were so tough that my body would ache in places I didn’t know was possible, I approached it not only with enthusiasm, but with an amount of confidence and purpose of mind incomparably more mature compared to those I had when I started tango:

I accepted from the start that my body will only be able to do all the things required from it up to a certain point. It will stumble and fail many times and it will hurt. Yet, as one of my tools I constantly applied the body awareness we work on and develop in our tango classes, and with that tool you are very aware of what you’re doing right or wrong, and what you’re supposed to do next and why. The praise or corrections I got from the instructor was something I took as simple input on how well I was doing the current exercise and what I should focus on more, and not as food for my ego. Instead, I would find enjoyment in what I was doing in that moment and, later on, in the realizations that I made progress.

The thing is, right now I feel very confident that I could take up pretty much any physical activity and know how to learn it – or, better yet, learn how to learn it. Learning tango through our teachers’ system has equipped me with an awareness of body that is constantly deepening and that I can apply not only in other skills, but which I also use when walking down the street.

Some might say that other types of challenges are much more complex than the ones we find when learning tango or kick-box, but I am more and more certain that a lot of them are the same, if disguised in different forms: learning how to observe yourself and the world around you; learning how to deal with your ego, the other people and the surrounding circumstances; learning how to act; learning how to grow; learning how to be happy; learning how to be sad; learning how to learn; learning how to be.