My Favorite Things

A few of my favorite things:

The sound of a clock’s hands running their course round a face of numbers ad infinitum.

Fingers on a keyboard, click, clack, click, clack in an empty empty room.

Solitary sunlight crawling onto dusty books through a dusty window.

Wind chimes making music for the trees to hear.

Coffee in the kitchen sharing a delicious scent that no one is awake to smell.​

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Italy – not a place to watch the sun crawl or listen to clocks ticking. For two weeks this summer, I spent my days on the northern coast of this bustling country, taking countless dance masterclasses, watching professional dance companies perform every night, and spending each meal discussing the new choreography and techniques we were experiencing every day. I watched dancers from around the globe express ideas with movement and colors and concepts I never could have imagined. I began to see my own dancing and choreography in a thousand different colors I didn’t know existed. And then I realized:

Creativity in solitude is like a black pen on white paper or milk in coffee: familiar and safe and practical. It fits right in that lovely box labeled “you can’t go wrong” and filled with all sorts of idioms and platitudes and ideas that make sense because they’ve been tried again and again…and again. Solitude is a box. A beautiful, quiet, tidy box where no one can bother you and you can practice your own insanity – repeating the same artistic concepts again and again and again and expecting an original masterpiece.

But what if “you can’t go wrong” is actually a lie? What if the insanity folded so neatly into the pretty little chest in my head could be disrupted to create something dangerous and uncertain and messy, made of a thousand colors and a million flavors? What if alone is cozy but together is the birth of masterpieces, and ingenuity, and that choreography you stare at with your mouth hanging open because you can’t believe your eyes, can’t believe what just happened, can’t comprehend how something that beautiful exists?

Italy was just that. I watched and I saw lots of blue and black and all the colors I already knew, and then I saw magenta, aquamarine, and amaranth, vermilion, titian, and jade, and all at once my chest looked empty and sad. I tipped it over and still the colors that poured out were painted in repeats and failed attempts and confusion and insanity, while the big bright world of dance that I was staring at outside my head sparkled with colors that were impossible and incomprehensible and intriguing.

And so I found a few new favorite things.

The gasps of air from twenty bodies on a sweaty stage pouring out scraps of their souls for hungry eyes.

The knock knock knock of ten pairs of pointe shoes rising falling in perfect harmony with the music, with the hearts beat beat beating on stage.

Seats on fire at the performers’ bows, when a body of humans rises unbidden to their feet to applaud of series of movements that moved their souls to see outside their own little chests of insanity, to peek into the colors of another person’s chest, to admire what colors each human utilizes to see and paint the world.

The boxes we live in daily are filled with bean bags and favorite stuffed animals and old pictures and silence. They are some of the coziest, safest places to exist. But they are made of walls that form barriers to the world. Until I peeked out from my chest of pretty platitudes, I could not see the faded glory of my own thoughts, the starvation my imagination suffered without the input of other minds, other ideas, other perspectives and colors and flavors.

Even beyond art, human beings must occasionally crack the lids off their own chests and dump out the colors, reach into other chests, look at other colors, and try to understand where those colors come from, and how they help us to learn the power of empathy in creating a world in which truth and justice and love are valued above agenda and opinion. Without the power of empathy, the concept of a global scholar is impossible. Without the willingness to open your eyes to others’ experience, life will be simply a black hole of revolving, repeating thoughts ad infinitum until you lie six feet underground, never having made a larger difference than bending a blade of grass, for you could not reach far enough beyond your own box to impact another’s.