"Everything Old Is New Again." 

(song by Peter Allen)

Taking a dance class would be a lot of fun, I thought.  So why not take Zumba, the high energy dance exercise with Latin and international music as the background?  All my friends kept talking about it.  They either loved it (it was so much fun) or hated it (the music was too loud.) There it was on the schedule at the YMCA.  I had time before I would go swimming.  I thought, "I am too stiff.  I need to move to music."  And how much fun it would to dance again.  I had always loved to dance - any style.  Moving in patterns, pushing my body, following a lead always felt kinesthetically powerful.

So there I was in the room ready for Zumba.  The space soon filled with a lot of younger women as well as a few women about my age.  We got into horizontal lines in front of a mirror, just like in my old dance classes of yore.  The the instructor came in.  She was upbeat, had on a headset mic, and never stopped smiling.  She went to the sound system and turned it on LOUD,  stood in front of us, and began to move. Contractions, convulsions, head turns, head swirls, arms front, arms back. Move here, move there.  High energy.  

I watched and began to move, as everyone else around me did the same.  Some were having an easier time than others, but all of us were trying. I do not think I have worked so hard, so intensively, so physically, in a long time. Not even when I climbed to the top of Mt. Eisenhower in the White Mountains this summer!

The class went on for an hour, a long hard torturous hour. I found muscles I had forgotten, muscles I never knew I had.  I pushed, I strained, I persevered.  And in the end, though my head was throbbing with the music and my body could not see straight, I felt triumphant.  When I walked out, legs trembling, I noticed that a salsa class was coming in later. After I got my legs steady under me.

So, I am starting again from the beginning, as I did when I first danced.  This time, though, I am starting from zed, starting with the notion of where I want to be but having to learn it all over again. 

"Let's start at the very beginning,

a very good place to start"

("The Sound of Music")

Common wisdom says to start at the beginning and work towards a goal.  But, what about that vision that compels us to start? Is that at the beginning or the end?  Isn't the beginning also the end?  What about "backwards planning"?  Isn't the beginning wherever we start?

We all commence our story, our project, our life-work in the way best suited to us.  Some start with an image, some with a song, some with a memory, some with a larger goal in mind.  Some start in the middle.  Some of us know the ending and want to find the beginning.   Some muddle through and pull it together in a way only they can understand.  

When I was an actress, we would talk about different acting techniques: inside out or outside in.  The "inside out" method was most popular at that time, but I usually preferred the "outside in" approach - creating the outside character first and using that to discover the insides.  

Sometimes I just can't make myself read a book from beginning to end; I start then skip to the end and then pick up again in the middle and read to the end.  Sometimes I eat my dessert first.  sometimes I think about what I want to say then figure out how to say it.  

A few days ago, I was stuck in the middle of a mess; I had been in vacation mode for too long and I suddenly remembered I had deadlines.  My desk was in an uproar; my projects were scattered in several rooms.  I had a grant to write, a story to create, luggage to unpack, a program to plan.  I needed to update my QuickBooks invoices and payments, and make good on promises made a while ago.  What to do, what to do.   After a period of what I judged to be justifiable panic, I took an action.  I did the first thing in front of me.  When that was finished I did the next thing that seemed if not logical then approachable.  Then the next, and so on.   I am still working my way out, just doing the next right thing, and I figure if I continue this way I will find my way to a new beginning.   

How do you work?  How do you live?  Where do you start from?



Thanks to Harold Gardiner for his work on "Multiple Intelligences", and to Grant Wiggins for simplifying "Backwards Design."


Tags:  storytelling, Harold Gardiner, Multiple Inteligences, Grant Wiggins, Backwards Design,