What do jazz shoes, road trips, 7-11 Slurpees, black cats, a purple castle, and Las Vegas all have in common? Perhaps and probably, it is of no significance to you. For me, though, it is my childhood. It was a way of life and my world.
As many of you know, my mom enrolled me in dance classes when I was three years old. From that point on, for the next decade, I was a part of almost every annual showcase, community performance, and competition there was on the island. More importantly, though, my family and I became a part of a larger family of girls who danced together, parents who rallied around us and enabled this reality, and supportive brothers who came along for the ride (and also filled in as Rat Kings and Sugar Plum Cavaliers when needed be).
Together, we traveled up and down the West Coast in matching mini-vans. We scrubbed dance floors on hands and knees. We ate fourth meals on a regular basis, well into the midnight hour. We rang in holidays and celebrated birthdays. And when tragedy struck, we got together, cried together, and remembered together.
This past week, I had a lot of time to reflect on this family as I hung out with some of them in Atlantic City and witnessed one of our own on her road to Miss America. Now while it would have been pretty cool if she had won, you know, save for the baby fact that no one would get to see nor talk to her for a year, she didn’t come out with the title at the end of the night. Regardless, title schmitle. This road was never intended to stop at a pageant. This past week was merely a pit stop, another notch, another story on our way to something greater—the road through Miss America, if you will—because apart from the pageant hooplah, I am learning to a greater degree that the sustenance of humanity is not in fancy titles nor accolades. Rather, it’s in others. It’s in the people we love and the people who love us. It’s in friendships and community and in eating corned beef sandwiches and Asian noodles at Irish pubs with one another at 2 o’clock in the morning.
Now, I know this all sounds cliché, but as Nancy Ortberg described it in her commencement speech to Westmont College’s Class of 2012, clichés become what they are because we try to hand them off on silver platters without the trials, tribulations, and experiences it took to learn them.
In the same vein, I easily understood the value of getting together in my head a long time ago when windbreakers were in and Justin Timberlake still had his curly white boy afro. I understood it in my head, though I couldn’t say until recently within the last couple of years that I really knew it for myself and in my heart. With that said, as I venture deeper into my future and further away from my past, I am tempted to mourn the death of a way of life that once was. I am tempted, that is, until I look up and around and see those loved ones still beside me and walking forward and growing with me.
No one can live in the past forever. On that same token, no one has to nor should they face the future alone, for life was never intended to be lived as a party of one.
Thus, as I wrap things up, I encourage you to look around, see who matters, and hold onto them. Call them up. Write them a letter. Holla at your guuurl (or boy). Skip the pleasantries and dive into the nitty gritty. I assure you that on your deathbed you won’t be reminiscing very much about what the weather was like that one September evening. So make the effort. Get together often. And love one another extravagantly. Your life will be better because of it and because of them, and you will accomplish far more together than you could have ever done by yourself.
