I miss dancing.

Don’t get me wrong, I still dance. I dance in the kitchen, bop around the loungeroom, bounce up the stairs to my front door keeping the beat all the way.

Sometimes it’s to tunes that I play through speakers letting the music spill out onto the street for all to enjoy, other times it’s through headphones that encase me in a private audible world, sometimes I have a tune stuck in my head that carries me along for hours at a time. Music is always there at the fringes of my mind or its centre stage taking my full attention.

The music hasn’t stopped with the rest of the world, neither has dancing but I do miss dancing to a degree even though I haven’t stopped stepping to the beat. I’ve never been much good with dance moves or steps, following or taking the lead but I never miss a beat, not any of them. I like to dance to all the beats, not all at once, I like to chose my beat of engagement with the rhythm and to switch and change as the beat grows and lessens with the journey of sound taking me from interlude to lyric then from crescendo to the drop.

The beat is the one thing that I still don’t miss as I groove daily when the mood strikes me but so many other things about dancing have left me lonely. Dancing, like making music itself, is a collaboration when best realised, a shared experience – the foundation of fun.

I miss the crowd, the energy generated by a throbbing mass of strangers sharing a sensory overload in a dark room.

I miss twisting, turning and stepping to the beat in mutable space that expands and contracts with the music in time evolving throughout the night with the mix of the set.

I miss connecting without words with strangers as we share a look or a knowing smile, or a thumbs up as our worlds collide momentarily without touching but because the music has synched us together.

I miss feeling the rhythm course through my being consumed by the throbbing beat that coerces my senses to fall in with the room, in time with the senses of people I don’t know and never will but share an experience with that words fail to truly capture.

I  miss claiming my space on the dancefloor – dancefloor real estate I call it – where when given the right conditions, right circumstances, right crowd and a talented DJ I can claim enough space to move and shake it into the night. A fixed point of focus undulating with the movement of the music and the bodies following the beat.

Dancing is zen, dancing is freedom, dancing is connecting my right and left hemispheres bringing my mind together as a moving meditation. Dancing is enlightenment, it raises my vibrations unleashing a feel-good sensibility that is hard to come by.

To reach the heights of unlimited happiness invoked by being lost in dance I may have to become a whirling dervish to make dancing my official religion. I have always managed to keep in time while lost in the dizzying elation of dance without any turns, all it takes is moving and changing with the beat.