BY ALEX STORY
There are many paths but only one can be trodden.
The human condition is thus forever reduced to considering the colour of one’s neighbour’s grass.
Is mine greener than his? His greener than mine?
So many doubts.
Sometimes, though, we come across a neighbour’s whose grass is deep in the brown and at the sight of which envy dissipates like chaff in the wind.
A few gardens watered by certain professional choices spring to mind, such as being a Parkinsons-afflicted proctologist, human rights lawyer or a diversity officer at a Stonewall, a formerly USAID-funded NGO.
And, that is, regardless of the cachet they might carry in Soho.
At other times, however, an alternative world seems within reach, albeit like a mirage beyond the Sahel.
Dangerously, dancing is one such.
Most have Paolo Conte’s “Happy Feet” when the drum sets the beat.
Fingers start to click, heads to nod, and hips to sway, because, as Shakira sang, they don’t lie.
While your physical diesel-like engine slowly gets into the groove, your mind has travelled three times around the world anticlockwise, transporting you to a universe in which You should be dancing, like a Tony Moreno, and staying alive as “a woman’s man with no time to talk”.
In that parallel world, you dance, they whoop and cheer deliriously, while your partner maintains a constant and deeply flirtatious eye contact built on a suggestively erotica-filled smile.
All that time, you lead the dance like a master and if you do sweat, it’s the fresh type filled with pheromones that hints at intimate physicality.
Inevitably, an inadvertent glimpse of yourself in the mirror gate crashes the fragile daydream.
It was all it took to reduce you from a John Travolta clone into a Leonard Cohen worm on a hook – naked, pale and graceless.
But the notion that you too could be as funky as Travolta or as gracious as Karlheinz Böhm and Romy Schneider in Sisi as they waltz the ballroom away, takes hold.
You leave the nightclub convinced.
You and your spouse join the entry level class – with twenty other couples. Awkward and exposed.
The teacher shows off basic moves. You tread heavy on your wife’s foot.
She sniggers. You say “sorry”. She answers, too quickly perhaps, “it’s ok, it happens to everyone”.
As the hour passes, progress is made.
The basic step seems mastered until another simple one is introduced.
Like landing on the wrong square in Snakes & Ladders, you tumble back to the start, reminding yourself of the long and winding road ahead.
The end of the first lesson, though, brings hope.
While we can’t all be Fred Astaire, with a lot of work, we can grow our dancing skills as a couple and, eventually, face another wedding dance floor with confidence.
The type that makes your neighbours think the grass on your side of the fence is greener than his. And that, somehow, makes you both feel good.
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.