Telling the Truth Tuesday - Dancing again, I think

Ever since I was four years old when I began taking tap and ballet lessons, dancing filled my soul with joy. Unfortunately, a sexual molestation at age seven and a traumatic incident involving my father at a dance recital shortly after that, caused me to quit for awhile. If you're interested in those stories, they are in the essays/articles tab on this blog and in my memoir as well.

At sixteen, I discovered folk dancing. I was a camp counselor at a Hebrew Day Camp and was assigned to assist the dance instructor, who was Israeli. Folk dances are cultural dances of a country. For example, the Hambo is a cultural dance from Sweden; the Czardas is a cultural dance from Hungary. Our recreational folk dance group does dances from Israel, Hungary, Sweden, Romania, Bulgaria, Servia, Croatia, Turkey, Greece, Albania, and many more.

 I quit folk dancing when I got married at 19 and didn't dance again until I divorced, at 28. After that it was 18 years before I would dance once more. It's where I met current hubby and it is something we share together. But I've had a series of injuries over the last few years that have kept me from dancing much at all: surgery on my left knee, surgery on my right ankle, a severely sprained left ankle, and surgery on my right shoulder. I am fine if I walk or hike, but dancing seems to aggravate my left knee. If I could just stick to slow, simple dances, I'd probably be fine, but when the music to a dance I love begins, I can't sit still. Then I pay the price--aching knee for several days afterwards.

At what point do we give in to things like that and let go of things we love. This is one of the crucial issues we face as we grow older. When to stop driving, when to let go of certain physical activities, when to acknowledge we can't remember whether we took our pills already this morning.

I'm turning 61 on April 24. I feel great (except for the aching knee after dancing). I am maintaining a 50-pound weight loss, I am singing regularly, my new writing is beginning to take off. Life is so incredibly wonderful. I'm not ready just yet to give up the dancing that I love, or to sit still while my favorite dances come on. Perhaps if I get in the habit of icing my knee after working it hard, and taking ibiprofen, I can eek out a few more years. I'm lucky that singing filled the void dancing left when I couldn't do it. But I'm greedy--I want to do both!

What things would be difficult for you to give up if you had to?

Blessings,
Karen