Ballet at Age 62

This is a wonderfully inspiring personal account of one woman's starting ballet classes at age 62.

It is kind of a long read, but worth the time when you have a spare moment.

Here are the points that really struck a chord with me:

• [I was] concentrating and wondering how something that looked so simple could possibly require so much thought, so much focus, so much attention to detail, so much invisible strength.
  
  
• I had a moment of what seemed like perfect clarity: My body and my mind were working as one.
  
  
• In ballet, my body is not a container. In ballet, there is no separating the body and the mind. I have to think hard to create the shapes, to make the movements of ballet. Even standing still in first position—which to the observer doesn’t look like anything—requires the engagement of muscles that will not turn on without my express command, muscles that do not engage reflexively the way my muscles do when going about ordinary tasks. There is nothing ordinary, nothing of the daily life, about ballet.
  
  
• I hadn’t known how much I would love making movement that so many had made before, movement that would be recognizable in previous centuries and centuries to come—and that would become mine as well, simply by my own attempts at thoughtfully performing them.
  
  
• In a ballet class, you feel, always, as if you are preparing for something... [but]… in ballet, unlike most other areas of life, “preparation” itself is an art form.
  
  
• No matter how familiar ballet gets, it remains unlike breathing or walking or what happens when we sit down or stand up. In ballet, there is a sort of tuning the mind into the place on its dial that monitors the body’s placement and carriage. It’s like the difference between talking and singing.... that elevation of the everydayness.
  
  
• All of my dance friends have busy, interesting, complicated lives. And yet here we are, day after day, leading with our hearts.