Missing the Dance

There is a song that was sung by Garth Brooks, I believe he wrote the song, simply called “The Dance.”  I suppose it is on one of his albums, but I could not tell you which.  I am not known as a huge country music, especially the slicked variety put out by Nashville.  But sometimes acts or songs do resonate and this one did.  I suppose the song is a love story, but the refrain is potent beyond its connection to the main lyric of lost love.

“Our lives are better left to chance

  I could have missed the pain

  But I’d have had to miss the dance.”

Herein lies the dilemma.  Do we avoid the neighbor out of fear and avoid our pain and miss the dance?  Or do we embrace him and suffer the consequences of the pain?  The problem I find is that if fears  conquer the man, the man ends not only his hurt but attempts to banish the other from creating the pain. In doing so the man who attempts to avoid the pain suffers from the fears of having not been able to enjoy the dance.  

But when we miss the dance, we miss the opportunity to dance with the other dance partners and they miss the opportunity to dance with you.  The one then blames the other for his own  missed opportunity, conflict pursues and we become an enemy of the partner we did not dance with.  As enemy to the partner we never embraced, we attempt to deny him the opportunity we feel he somehow denied to us because we were afraid of him to begin with.  He is wrong to have an opportunity to dance and I am right to deny him because I am afraid if I offer to dance with him that he might reject me, and I will suffer the pain of his rejection, so I don’t dance with him and I stilt myself.  Dammit man, because you are afraid to feel the pain, the wound festers much worse, it becomes gangrenous and intoxicates the fibers of your being.  I know a small bit about gangrene  and the aftermath can be dealt with, but if you don’t cut out the infection it grows, it kills the spirit, and the only way to deal with that is dooming  oneself to damn oneself to more pain that you would have not have felt if you had never feared the rejection in the first place.

Maybe you will be challenged, maybe some will throw stones at you, stones of word or stones of crafted material.  Get back up as did Cool-Hand Luke and maybe the enemy becomes the best friend.  And maybe not.  If not, so what?  Words of castigation that deter the other create words of castigation flung upon you.  Words of castigation create the pain, and words flung back lead to “white supremacy.” Enemies of hate come to blows. Much is written about white supremacy.  I find it mostly bullshit, frankly.  The  white supremacist is afraid to participate in the dance and therefore his fear becomes a gangrene that consumes him.  The point missed in discussing the white supremacist is that he doesn’t really hate just the black man, he hates all men. He hates his wife and beats her.  He hates his children and attempts to mutilate them into suffering his own pain.  He hates his fellow white supremacists, but joins them to wield a common club of hatred.  When one avoids the dance, the avoider, unwilling to take a chance on others, despises himself and fears himself and can only wake up tomorrow to prevent the dance from being held.  If the dance is never held, if the seeds are not allowed to grow, then the other is subdued to my power.  My power of fearing my own self and denying power to the other.  That is the power of fear and leads to all conflict that one who is fearful of participating in the dance and attempts to shut down the dance.  The fear and the self-despicable pain is the seed of all discontent.  The discontent that forces one to be unhappy leads him to desire discontentment to all..  The truth about any supremacist is that he needs to be superior because he denies how inferior he is to himself.

If you are afraid of the pain, be it the pain of loss in competition, the pain of loss in being rejected by another, or the pain of physical wounding, then one gives oneself no chance to heal and the infestation is worse than any pain that  one might be able to heal from.  If one enters the dance, if he takes the chance, he grows from the pain that heals.   But to never take the chance one will still die and fear his death as only one more dance he is afraid to take.  He will til the end hope for a miracle, and sometimes the miracle comes, and that happened to me as well.  Of course if covid hadn’t come along and the hospitals hadn’t been overcrowded and they hadn’t sent me to a new hospital and a new doctor, in the midst of covid hadn’t thought to take a chance,  and look for a cause others hadn’t taken.  But miracles are only because of willingness to take a chance, the creativity that allows man to advance in knowledge, to seek better tools and craft beautiful arts is by those not hindered from their own fears.  

If we are afraid of taking a chance and we are unwilling to participate, unfortunately we doom ourselves to the worse and unhealing pain of our own making.  Once upon a time someone suggested I should not denigrate myself and claim I am ugly.  But if I cannot accept my physical unattractiveness, then I would myself be despising others for rejecting me. And I would never dance. If I embraced it as I did, I developed a great deal of passionate, but not physical, love affairs.  I was able to share myself deeply with women without having to expect them to desire me physically. And because I didn’t try to demand they accept physical overtures I made that they may not have wanted, many loved me, and once in awhile, a few made overtures to me towards the physical embrace.  I always tried to participate in the dance and I found others willing to dance with me, more women than men.  Men saw my ugly as belittling to me, and non–threatening to them, so they didn’t feel obligated to sparfully dance to prove they were more masculine than I.  Women, on the other hand, when I showed I was not afraid of my own ugliness,  often were encouraged to be my lover, physical or more often,  otherwise.  Once my wife said to me that she did not feel I was unattractive. '`Oh, " I replied, “what features of mine do you find attractive?’  “ “No, it’s not that, you’re attractive to me because of who you are, not what you look like.”  “Exactly”, I responded.  I was rewarded I believe by embracing what could have been my pain and avoiding the fear of being rejected into the very pain so many try to avoid.

Too many who want to lead want partners to dance around them but don’t want to join their partners on the dancefloor.. These leaders try to shut down any dance that is not encircled in their snare and  to avoid all other dances.  And thus the world wars with itself and the partners it should be dancing with.

Full lyrics Garth Brooks song, “The Dance:

                 Looking back on the memory of

The dance we shared 'neath the stars above

For a moment all the world was right

How could I have known that you'd ever say goodbye

And now I'm glad I didn't know

The way it all would end the way it all would go

Our lives are better left to chance

I could have missed the pain

But I'd have had to miss the dance

Holding you I held everything

For a moment wasn't I a king

But if I'd only known how the king would fall

Hey who's to say you know I might have changed it all

And now I'm glad I didn't know

The way it all would end the way it all would go

Our lives are better left to chance

I could have missed the pain

But I'd have had to miss the dance

Yes my life is better left to chance

I could have missed the pain

But I'd have had to miss the dance