Yesterday I was thinking of how right my mother is when she says “I wish I was 20 all over again”. When I was 15, I couldn’t understand that. I wanted to grow up very fast, being independent. I was picturing this amazing life waiting for me, that I could just not grasp because I had to wait at least to be 18 years sold (or more! I grew up in Italy, ehehe).
But then it really hit me. I proposed myself to the ETH, the famous university of Zurich, for teaching salsa on a Friday social dances workshop. Most of the participants were quite young. I mean in their 20s.
Not that I consider myself old, that is not the point, is just that I could feel this freshness and this life zest that in many occasions of adult life is completely lost.
I could see the wish of knowledge they had, the enthusiasm for any little thing I said about Cuban salsa, when I played a new song and encouraged them to go to some salsa club, even if they were beginners. One of them, a girl, even said “I would like to try to be the leader” and her boyfriend wanted to be follower. Change of positions, and it made me think about what I wrote 2 weeks ago, about the fact that there are leaders or followers, but that in any moment we could just be either of it. There were no “boxes” or categories there, everyone was just enjoying.
And right after that, when I got home, I found out about a dancing community in Colombia, where the dancing was literally saving the lives of many young people who used to be street criminals with no purpose, and they had quit that thanks to the fact that they felt they were part of a bigger purpose.
They found their passion, and they said something like this, about the dancing moves “I did not know that my body could do these incredible things”. They thought they were going back to their African origins, they thought they had finally understood what their existence meant.
If you feel that, for some reasons you can’t explain, your life has no meaning or that is something you need but you cannot grasp, cultivate a hobby you love. Anything. Think of activities you loved as a child, or that you always wished to try. It is time!