"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.