Dancing through life

In "The Big Five for Life" the character Thomas advocates for everyone he works with to know their reason for existence and to strive to reach their big five for life. The big five for life from the book are often concrete experiences people want to make - like climbing a mountain or speaking a non-native language fluently. Those are goals that people use to create meaning for their actions. What I think is very valuable and why the book resonates as widely as it does, is to think about what you know about yourself today and then acting on it. Given what you know about yourself today, what makes you happy? What does a world you want to live in look like? The answers to questions like this are a good place to start on deciding how to life your life. However, you are not set in stone and by extension, what you know about yourself might not fit anymore tomorrow. I think this is the reason why the book didn't move me as much as people in my bubble.

I'll try to explain what I mean with dancing and how it captures an aspect I am missing from a goal-oriented approach to life and meaning. Dancing puts an emphasis on acting to your environment. To be a good dancer means to continuously adjust what you are doing in response to what's happening. I don't work towards a handful of experiences or goals. That's why motivational self-help books focused on goals are not my thing. Of course I deeply value some type of experiences and seek them out; things like bike traveling or rock climbing. I value them because I feel so alive doing them. That's what I'm after. And that's why I want to dance through life.

I'll end with two quotes from "Thinking in Systems":

We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them! I already knew that, in a way. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback. It had never occurred to me that those same requirements might apply to intellectual work, to management, to government, to getting along with people.

There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work hard at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of not-knowing. In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.

Have fun dancing!

Update 2024-06-13: this blog post makes similar points but articulates them differently, and helpfully as I think