Snack #10: Time Travel & Mondays
After teaching in Phoenix, pouring 2 hours of heart into an "Emotion:Uncensored" workshop and countless hours of prep beforehand, there was a social. I was pumped, excited - this was the first social since COVID hit, still masked, but super energetic and highly anticipated.
Then, after 1 hour, I was done. I wanted to go home and sleep, not see any people, definitely not dance. I was extremely sensitive from the workshop - which made us all open up - but also just lacked the stamina to connect and dance with people for long, even though I wanted to.
I noticed that time flew by fast while teaching, but at the social, time was on slow-mo. 20 minutes seemed like 90, and each minute around all these stimuli was draining my energy. It was a truly strange experience, to feel time move this slow, especially in a scenario where I'm supposed to be having fun.
Time and the perception of it showed me how much energy we sometimes exude when interacting with people continuously, and how it's a skill to practice like anything else, to become comfortable with.
A lesson from a thing:
Mondays are my day off. Everyone returns to work as I lay on the couch doing absolutely nothing, such satisfaction. The idea is that I intentionally try to not learn anything new, perform any work (even if I like it), or take action towards any future work. I only do what I feel like doing - if it's Netflix, fine. Produce music? Cool. Don't feel like it after 15 mins? Great, back to Netflix.
This isn't easy, it really took some practice on my end, coming from a goal-oriented upbringing, but it gets easier. I noticed that when I intentionally don't want to even try to do things, I can feel the genuine urge to put in work into the passions in my life, be it dance, music, or empathy training. I found myself "working" on Mondays out of pure joy and desire.
It didn't feel the same, it feels like there's more space, I'm not rushing to complete anything, and all my creativity can take its time to flow at the comfortable pace in which it wants to.
So, my work became my fun, off-day activity, but did it really? I never wanted to treat art and learning as work, and that intentional day off reminds me of what I love to do, why I love it, and HOW I love to do it.
Dance:
I was feeling sexy here, was telling a story of seduction...