How I Know I'm On The Right Track

Who could have known that dance + graphic design = breathtaking?

Thought I've been really settling down and settling into Montana living, one of the things that really makes me long for New York is a burgeoning dance scene.  When I first moved to New York and  didn't know a single soul save for my very busy finance-type brother who didn't have time to listen to be bitch about my social circle of one, I used to take the subway down to Steps on 72nd Street and Broadway and pour out all of my 20-something emotional angst into lyrical class. Sorry, Bryan if I cried while working on layouts.  I probably had gotten an envelope thrown at my head that day.

Movement is such a big part of my life, so it's no wonder that I turned to teaching yoga.  Oddly, yoga is now more commercialized than dance, which is great for my practice but not so great for the root of me that really feels grounded when I'm just flinging limbs around to Ingrid Michaelson's version of Radiohead's "Creep".

Which brings me to the topic of how I'm on the right track.  Growing up, I always knew I was happiest when I was moving.  Either dancing, or doing flips off the couch, or running down the creek behind our house to dig in the mud under an old local highway overpass(where my brother swore there were dinosaur footprints. How they managed to build an overpass ON TOP OF BILLION YEAR OLD DINOSAUR FOOTPRINTS WITHOUT DISTURBING THEM I'll never know).

So then, when I went to college and majored in Foreign Service, and took a lot of classes NOT about dancing, and danced not as often as I would have liked, and then went into the real world and danced hardly ever because DANCING IS NOT A CAREER and now, here I am living in the Mountain West, doing yoga, riding my bike, and dancing the fuck around my room whenever I feel like it, I'm the happiest I've been in a long damn time.

The point is that I already knew all of this about myself.  From the moment I started marathon training four years ago, to the day that I was excused from work to go on a golf outing, to the entire summer I spent in the field hucking a backpack everyday, I knew that moving was the thing that I loved to do most out of everything else.

Penelope Trunk says we shouldn't do what we love.  Fine, I agree. I'd likely go insane if my career was to dance around in my underwear all day (plus, also, I think that already might be a career path that I'm not down to pursue).  But for years I struggled with trying to figure out what it was that I needed more of in my life to make me happier and the answer was simple; something I really knew all along.

Take a look at your life right now.  What are you missing that you loved to do when you were a child? What parts of your life do you really, really enjoy?  What parts are totally bumming you the fuck out?

I'm not saying you have to go AWOL and live in a yurt because you really enjoyed confined spaces as a kid. Plus, I don't think I could have taken the types of jobs in New York City that I really wanted to take without living on a couch and eating beans and rice every night.  Dreams have to be funded.

But if you get really, really uncomfortably honest with yourself and you strip down to the root of your dissatisfaction, the solution is probably buried in there, somewhere deep.  

In any case, you already know what you need.  You just need a little space, time, and maybe a dance break or two to figure it out.

What are the things that are missing in your life that you are totally missing?  How do you know if you're on the right track or not?