On my own two feet

Recently I’ve felt the urge to “upskill.” I put this word in quotation marks because I don’t actually like the word and its connotations. And yet, lately I have been consumed by this drive to "upskill."

If I’m being honest with myself, I think it’s because I’m uncomfortable with the attention that I’ve been getting since my book was published. Don’t get me wrong…I’m very proud of what I’ve written, and I feel accomplished to have put it out there in the world, but that pride is something that lives within my own chest. It doesn’t come from anywhere else except the knowledge that I put all of myself into something and produced something of quality, something I believe in and can stand by.

During the process of writing the book, I never let myself think about this attention part of the equation. And as an introvert and an artist, I really dislike outside attention. I know other people are happy for me and they want to show it (I would want to do the same for them). I really do appreciate their kindness. But I feel much better when creating than when being praised for my creations. That’s just the way I’m wired.

To distract myself from the discomfort of receiving attention from others, I’ve been desperately throwing myself into new challenges—the more structured and difficult, the better. I have been drawn to online courses on all sorts of topics, credentialing programs, and even a Master program of late. Anything that can get me out of this discomfort of feeling like some sort of expert and can put me right back into the hard seat of student again, I’ll take it. Thankfully I haven’t actually signed up to any of these expensive courses yet. I think the wiser part of me recognizes that this is a desperate but temporary thirst, like an “ate too much popcorn at the cinema” thirst—a thirst to be more than what I am.

I hate the word “upskill” because it implies that you can learn something through sheer determination and structure, and that it happens in a very linear fashion. I’m not denying that this is possible. I have been through courses that were linear and structured and that did, indeed, “upskill” me. What bothers me about this approach is that the quest to learn should be a lifelong one, and it should take the shape of a spiral staircase, where we keep circling back to the same things we’ve learned before and understanding them more deeply in a new light. And learning should come from an inner curiosity, from a desire to understand the world and ourselves better. We should want to dig deeper, not build up.

I liken it to this somatic experience I had once when I was in a weekend samba workshop held in Newcastle a few years ago. The teacher was this petite older lady who had flown in from Brazil. From memory, she wore a bandanna on her head, like the kind you would wear if you were doing some big-movement manual labor down in front of you, like washing clothes by hand in a river, to keep your hair out of your face. She had deep wrinkles on her face, but you couldn’t guess her age, because she exuded so much beauty, joy, and grace. She looked like she had some African heritage in her lineage, and she spoke of the African roots of spirituality in samba music, how samba has been used by some Afro-Brazilians over the years to commune with the gods of nature, the orishas.

I don’t remember anything else that was taught in the workshop—any of the particular dance moves—except for what she said about standing on your own two feet. According to her, when your weight is centered on your own two bare feet, and your feet are really grounded on the floor (you really let them sink in), you can feel the spirit of the Earth rising up through your feet and flowing through your body. This spirit moves up through your legs, hips, abdomen, chest, shoulders, and arms. That is what real samba is all about.

Many of the samba dancers who parade in the Brazilian carnaval are also dancing a form of samba, but it is a showier, flashier form that is danced on the front of the feet. It’s a peacock style of dancing. Those beautiful dancers are not connected to the ground, really—it’s almost like they’re flying. But you can always spot from afar a samba dancer who is really grounded in her movements. You can see her heaviness and the earthiness in her hips, like she is dancing into the ground itself. You see it with some dancers of Cuban salsa as well, perhaps because they also have their connections with Afro-spiritualism. It’s such a beautiful thing to behold.

What I’m getting at (I think) is that, like my samba/orisha teacher conveyed, I need to learn to stand on my own two feet and resist the urge to be taller. I need to stay connected to what is real and not be blown about by every gust that comes along. I need to recognize that I do have authority, and that that authority comes from my connection to Nature and the deep well of understanding that I am boring through everything I have learned and everything I will continue to learn. I need to recognize that I don’t necessarily need to enroll in a course with a credential at the end in order to discover the intricacies of something. And I need to remember that people don’t value me for all of these skills that I have accumulated on paper over the years—they value me for who I am.

I’m already a complete person, just by virtue of standing on my own two feet.