A Human Thing:
Speaking to one of my Israeli friends followed by a conversation with one of my American friends, I realized, as I have many times in the last few years, how our interpretation of emotion, tone, and content, can be extremely different between cultures.
Example:
I want to ask my friend to go somewhere (say, the beach)
Israel: "Wanna go to the beach?", and then, if prompted for details: "We're gonna have cool music and people, and BBQ"
USA: "Hey, so there's this beautiful beach nearby, it's got really nice trees and seashells, and the water isn't too cold, so I was talking to some friends about going and maybe having a BBQ and chillin'...so, if you don't have any plans, would you want to come?"
The indirect, personal-space-oriented communication in the US has been very difficult, as the actual topic and purpose of some questions only present themselves at the end. I wonder - do we dance similarly? I feel like even though in the US we might speak indirectly, we speak more directly in dance, where it actually matters - even more - to provide extra personal space and build trust.
A Lesson from a thing:
Reading an article about the connection between adult attachment in relationships and childhood attachment profiles has given me some interesting insight.
It seems that even though the way we attached to our parents affects our ways of attaching to partners in adulthood, the connection is very slim - no studies have found a strong link, at most 13-20%. Moreover, it seems that whatever we developed as children can indeed change.
I don't quite believe that people change, but I do believe that even if our most inner mechanisms of attachments remain, we can definitely learn and adapt other mechanisms to deal with emotions properly, make sense of how we feel, and "reroute" emotional reactions and interpretations to more helpful sections of our minds.
In this dance video, I'm connecting to my body without any intense emotion...but I loved how what I ended up doing, and especially Jonelle's responses 😆