Undergraduate / Common App Prompt 5 - Personal Growth through Spanish Dance [7]

5. Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

"Don't Think"

I was dancing the salsa, dressed in authentic colombian attire with a rose in my mouth when I first met my new school principal. Sweat dripped down my forehead as I synced my body to the sound of Alberto Barros's "La Palomita" while trying to sneak a glance at my professor's larger than life smile and his (almost) tears of joy.

A week prior, we'd each been assigned the daunting task of performing a Latin American dance and teaching it to the class. No worries, I thought. I know how to teach. I know how to give a presentation. There was just one small thing holding me back: I had never learned to dance.

And there was no way I was going to dance in front of the class, not only because I'd look like a fool, but because I doubted I actually could -- heck, I can barely walk down a flat sidewalk without tripping on my own shoes.

Nevertheless,that night I pulled out spotify, and invited in the culture of Colombia to my home. To savor the taste of Grandma's leftover brisket from our Rosh Hashanah dinner, to temporarily regret Grandma's brisket while laying on the couch. To study calculus and chemistry and world history. And I didn't think about the dance (or lack-thereof) once.

So I had the music, the rhythm, and the end goal: the dance. Now I only just had to get there.

I took an engineering approach to the dance and decided on a "divide and conquer" method. I would learn the arm movements, the leg movements, then what to do with my body and head and finally put it all together. It seemed like nothing more than a simple process, not unlike implicit differentiation or equilibrium reactions.

I had spent hours figuring out the exact height to which I'd raise my left leg before alternating with my right and at which angle to do so. On finding the ideal time lapse between arm rotations and full body twists, between the dips and final bows, striving to create a memorable 73-second experience.

And yet, when I watched the self-recorded video of the final product, the only way to describe it was: "odd". I mean, I was dancing the salsa, yet I lacked that little bit of oomph. In a way I was more Frankenstein's Monster than Joaquín Cortés. Created, programmed step-by-step. But the presentation was tomorrow, what else was there to do?

It was five minutes till I was to present, and with Bernhard Kahn's masterpiece playing in the hall, I was practicing my "walk". As I made my final preparations, my professor joined me in the hall, noting my obvious tension and stiffness, to which he told me "Don't think about it" followed by his (in)famous phrase "It's not the ACT."

Don't think, I thought to myself, awaiting the all-too-familiar "pum pum" beat and the 16-second mark where I would begin.

And so "La Palomita" began again, and I started anew.

And I didn't think about the dance. I didn't think about blueprint that I had created, nor about how the school principal and other administration personnel walked in just prior.

Rather, I felt it. I felt the rhythm, the beat, the countless hours of "pum pum" and "palomita." I felt the culture and I felt connected. I didn't think about the dance, I just did it. My hips swayed, my legs planted smoothly on the ground and in a rhythm not calculated by math, but rather by feeling. By emotion.

It was in that moment that I experienced something all but forgotten in the recent years of studying and working, that simple feeling of a kid going down a slide, or ziplining through the forest: pure, unengineered, uncalculated, worryless fun.

Not everything has to be created or solved, some things you just do for the heck of it. It's fun.

Thinking was my past. Doing is my future.