LIVE, LOVE, DANCE BY CHRISTINA TOWNSEND

Life is a dance.

Constantly challenging you to find a more intricate or more beautiful or more exciting or more adventurous way to express yourself. Constantly expecting you to strive for perfection, even though you’ll never reach it. Constantly asking you to do everything the right way, yet also make it look easy and painless. Constantly pushing you to tell a story that is unique yet relatable.

For a long time, I thought the only place where I could be creative was in a dance studio or on a stage. I thought that choreographing a piece for a showcase was my only outlet for creativity. And when I stepped into that studio to start creating a piece of art with my body, I never hesitated to try something different, to let one failure lead to a better success than I had imagined.

Then I came to college and stopped dancing, at least stopped performing. So, it became abundantly clear that I needed to re-discover my creativity. Every time I hear a song playing, I start choreographing in my head and sometimes I’ll even find myself moving without noticing. In my everyday life, however, I stay reserved and never let that uninhibited creativity spill over.

But life calls me to let it. It wants me to accidentally and without noticing question my surroundings and challenge what’s been done before to find that more intricate or more beautiful or more exciting or more adventurous way to do something. It wants me to never hesitate to fail because in our biggest failures come our greatest successes.

Life is a dance. Embrace it.