Shut Up and Dance with Me: The Symbolism of Songs #2

In the symbolism of songs, Shut up and Dance with Me is the song that is with me at the moment.

When a song stays with me I realize there’s something deeper going on.  I wake up in the morning with it in my head. And from a genre I don’t even particularly like. Disco, cotton candy type music. Not something I listen to out of choice. A song that found me through me listening to a YouTube music channel “A Beautiful Day”.

Dance with me the Dance of Life

So why is this touching something deeper in me. There is low energy stalking me at the moment around my work. There is a rift in the team. A canyon that seems unlikely to be bridged. And yet the group that has rallied around on our side of the rift seems tight.

I’m feeling the song is not necessarily a boy meets girl theme, but rather a life meets person kind of riff.

It is an invitation to dance with life, to be pulled into the hustle and bustle of life. Letting go of what may be or can’t be changed and allowing life to dance with me.

The mention of, “my Juliet teenage dream” from a symbolic aspect speaks not only of tragedy but also of the “joie de vivre” of life during the teenage years.

In the rift, there is a sense of the death of something, something that should have been precious.

Romeo & Juliet

 

There is a Romeo & Juliet aspect to work. Something star-crossed, something that dances with me, a love affair we carry with us each day and endeavour to bring to our work. In the earlier years, there was a sense that this was a safe place to be me. Indeed, one of the admonitions we were given in the training was to be ourselves.

And then something came along that turned that love affair with the work into something hijacked by a feud between the Capulets and the Montagues. The unions. Or so it seemed. The working relationship that existed became a death pact and trust between all parties was the casualty.

Perhaps the lightness of the song is just what is needed to mitigate the effects of this funerary air that is almost palpable in the office.

But hey, where does life dancing me come into this?

The Dance

I spent a couple of years trying to learn to dance rock’n’roll and like I said earlier the genre was not really my thing. I prefer heavier rock music, which some have said to me, “That’s not really music”. Personal preference I guess. I like what I like.

In rock’n’roll, in fact, in most forms of dancing, the male leads and the woman follows. Only I was the less experienced of the two and so was expecting to be led.

Hence, mostly I had two left feet. I persevered and could do the moves but come back the next week, I’d forgotten them and had to just about relearn from scratch. My heart wasn’t in it.

So how do we learn to dance with life?

Being Drawn into the Moves

When you find something that brings your heart to the table (it may not be dancing) you may find that life begins to dance you. You’ll be drawn into this thing that moves your heart and mind inspiring you to action. Action is the dance that raises your energy to step forward into your dream.

Each action is a step in the dance towards fulfillment. Fulfillment is the achieving of a goal. Dances are a series of moves, just as dreams are a series of goals.

When we commit ourselves to our dream, we are committing to dance with that dream. We need to commit to action. We need to learn the steps that will be required to bring that dream to life. As we learn and practice the steps we create habits. Persistence with habits allows us to assimilate these actions until they become second nature to us.

Consistent action enhances our Reticular Activating System (RAS) a bundle of nerves in our brain stem that serves us by screening the unnecessary and enabling focused attention on our beliefs.

That belief in our dreams is what attracts them to us. Committing is an act of intention. Intention creates attraction.  I experience the power of intention most powerfully in meditation.

When a project is uppermost in our minds often placing ourselves in a meditative state will draw ideas around the fulfillment of the project to us.

At present, I’m learning about laser engraving on to different media and as I was meditating ideas around expressing this in a creative way were coming to me

Dance with Me is Destiny

There are no mistakes in the Tango. Not like life. It’s simple. That’s the great thing about the Tango. If you make a mistake – get all tangled up – you just Tango On.

Al Pacino’s character in “Scent of a Woman”

 

I can’t remember where I heard the following… “Our destiny is what we create for ourselves. Fate is what we allow life to create for us”.

As life begins to dance us and we take the steps to meet life in the dance we may tangle up as we learn what life wants from us. I was talking before about action. And when we take conscious action toward our dream we are creating a destiny for ourselves.

Getting tangled up means untangling and then Tangoing on. There’s definiteness of steps in the Tango. You can set yourself again and return to the dance.

We may have reached a point in our lives where the beliefs that have taken us this far no longer serve us. Being stuck comes to mind. Needing to untangle ourselves from these beliefs that are keeping us stuck and simplify may be a choice we have to make. We may need to unlearn so we can untangle. And then find and assimilate new beliefs in order to Tango on with life.

New beliefs lead to new ways of being. When we come to new ways of being through learning and assimilating we become one with the dance of life until we get out of step again and get tangled. And get untangled again and Tango on.

There are no mistakes. There are no failures. As Edison discovered while inventing the light bulb, it wasn’t thousands of failures it was thousands of ways it didn’t work. Until it did.

Discovering the lightbulb led Edison on a merry dance. I’m glad he didn’t give up that dance. I might not be sitting here bashing out this post on my laptop and having life dance with me.

Blessings