Welcome Back!
Hello! And happy Labor Day — which I hope you are celebrating, like me, by adamantly not laboring.
Instead this weekend I hiked through wetlands and oak savanna and onto the beach at the state park that I now consider my new front yard. I went to the county fair in Wisconsin and ate delicious, butter-drenched roasted corn and chocolate-dipped soft serve. I slept in and stretched out, and did labor some on my house, finally breaking down and bundling up the four dozen cardboard boxes and mountain of bubble wrap that had accumulated on the front porch since we moved a month ago. And now I’m rewarding myself by writing from the recliner on said porch, as the neighborhood kids whiz back and forth on their scooters and the cicadas rev up for their evening song.
It’s nice up here in Waukegan, on the far north shore. I’m surprised by how normal it feels already, as though the past 29 years in the city were all just part of the process of getting me here — which, I suppose they were, just as it took five years in New York to get me to Chicago, and twenty-odd years in Seattle to get me to Ohio and then New York. Wherever I am 29 years from now, I assume this house, this porch, this recliner, will seem just a necessary stop on the way to that further destination. I hope I make it that far to find out.
After we’d decided to move up here, but before the move had actually happened, I was consumed with anxiety about just one seemingly minor aspect of this life change: how was I going to get to class? This new neighborhood offers many amenities, but a robust network of opportunities to dance and fly is not among them. For that, I need to go to Chicago.
For a few weeks I kept telling myself I’d get back into the swing of things after Labor Day; figure out a schedule, get my body back on track. But then I figured fuck it: why wait? Last week I rode my bike to the train, and then put my bike on the train, traveled the hour into the city, rode my bike to the dance studio, went to class, and then turned around and reversed it. It was a five-hour project, only 90 minutes of which were spent dancing, and while I’m glad I did it, by the end I was feeling a little silly. Why was this so important again?
It’s important because, as I wrote back in February, “Everything I want to do now lives in my muscles and bones, and as the clock ticks onward I’m reminded every day of the loss of strength, of flexibility, of estrogen.” Or to put it more bluntly: I’m reminded of death. I am very lucky that, thus far, I haven’t had a recurrence of the breast cancer I was diagnosed with and treated for in 2022 — or an occurrence of any other cancer for that matter. Some of my friends have not been so fortunate, and I now understand the truth, opaque perhaps to outsiders, that anyone who has lived with cancer in the past carries on to live in the shadow of cancer in the present.
Returning to a serious movement practice — or even and especially a silly one — has been, for me, a way of making comprehensible the limits of this mortal life. Because in this practice, hooo, are there limitations, not just of geography but of strength, flexibility, and courage. It’s scary to walk into a class of young and limber strangers and assert yourself, by your presence, as a peer. It’s humbling to stumble through the combination, to realize your hesitation at launching yourself into the air stems from the very real memory of that one time you did that with such exuberant joy — and broke a bone.
As a dancer, I see how I hold back, how I carry this sense of limitation in my body. I’m fearful of pushing to the edge of my capabilities, of extending my limbs fully, of diving for the floor, of going for the double when the single is safer. I see, in other words, how I restrict my range of motion, just as I worry that by moving to the suburbs I am restricting my range as well. I ride my bike to the train, to the city, to class as part of my practice. As we get older, it takes more effort to resist complacency and simply show up, but every time I show up to class I think I’m stretching a little bit further.
If you have down time this Labor Day, maybe you want to read the essays that got me started on this track? I’m linking them below.
Range of Motion, Part 1; Range of Motion, Part 2; Range of Motion, Part 3
"As we get older, it takes more effort to resist complacency and simply show up, but every time I show up to class I think I’m stretching a little bit further." The effort has been exhausting as of late for me, but this is a reminder that stretching myself is sooooo worth it. This post is really resonating with me today. Thank you.
I really needed to read this today. Thank you. Good to have you back.