Eudaimonia

Boys at Broughty Ferry beach & playpark

A: I don't like not knowing! This is why I always want to know.

B: Goodness, what nuisance you must have been at school :)

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The reason the younger one only has a towel is because his school uniform is soaked from jumping in the water play.  This was at a playpark at Broughty Ferry, a seaside village we went to on Wednesday afternoon. I never care about clothes that get wet or muddy after school. It is the sign of a good afternoon outdoors and I have time to wash them. We are out a lot but even for us that was a pretty good day with much play, cuddles, fish and chips by the harbour wall, ice cream and no washing up. 

 When the weather is this good in Scotland, you want to make the most of it. I did and confess I spent lunchtime of the same day at another beach. If you like beaches, it is Elie, in Fife, if you are this way.

I find an idea from the article I mentioned last time pretty easy to accept:  provide good conditions in which your children can grow and discover who they are rather than deciding that for them. I know not everyone does. When my second baby was messily, but with rapidly improving hand-eye-mouth co-ordination feeding himself with large chunks of whatever appealing food he could grab and lift I remember a Japanese mother telling me how she spoonfed her child for years past infancy because she couldn't bear the mess.   It strikes me now how much letting your children find out often does seem related to mess.  Perhaps it's just boys.  More generally what "good conditions" are I think include those you can tolerate and even - it took me a long time to learn this - thrive in yourself.  

“Educating” children is to me increasingly distasteful as a term because it implies I am going to do this to you because I know best. You are a beginner/a child/know nothing/have less power than me.  Unsaid is the scary addendum - because I can and (chillingly) you can't do anything about it. There are such parallels with social dance, learning naturally versus being taught in class.

Beginners at anything, but most especially children are so vulnerable.   I like it when children make or are at least involved in decisions.  It used to frustrate me no end that my parents got to decide everything.  As part of decision-making, children have more say about things that affect them; decisions such as what constitutes a good learning environment or a pleasant home.  What if they could not just design a playpark but say more often how they would like their town or their countryside to be? How often do children get to say what services or facilities are important to them?

What about reward and success?  What if children could decide what defines and constitutes these rather than it being defined and decided for them?  Do they know that Xerxes was astonished to learn that the Greeks competed at the Olympic games for a wreath of olive, which is to say, for honour?  The Games still stand apart from ordinary life in many ways but it is interesting that this and the setting aside of politics and war has been often preserved as it was in ancient times, although in the US, Singapore and Indonesia, athletes can win big cash prizes.  What do children think about the commercialisation of sport and in particular the Olympic Games?  Does the history of the Games matter? Does history matter?  Do they know that after Salamis, Eurybiades was honoured in the same way with an olive wreath for valour, as was Themistocles for wisdom and skill?  Footnote:  Themistocles' honour did not last long in his homeland.  He was hounded from Greece by the Spartans, but honoured and employed instead by Xerxes the Persian king against whom he had led the heavily outnumbered Allied Greek forces.  Plutarch claims to have met a descendant of Themistocles who was still paid honours by the Persians 600 years after his illustrious ancestor died. How fickle honour, respect and status, but also how enduring!

Admittedly, the Greeks were honouring these things as part of success in war (again, does history matter?!), but I wonder what children think about this aspect of a people who valued these things not only (or not always) with power and office but very publicly yet in these simpler ways.   What is success?  What recognition?  What reward?  What the difference between them, what makes them endure or not and does any of it matter? How much are these ideas raised with children?  Does that in itself matter?

As with the some of the most interesting things in life, the questions become labyrinthine:   how should we view a people who honour valour so simply yet so profoundly yet who also stone Lycidas, a councillor to death (and his wife, and his family) who merely proposes listening to the Persian envoy when the two sides find themselves caught in a  tricky stalemate.  How much can history teach us about perspective and otherness?  How much is history, (like memory) a store on which we draw?  Is that what history is - collective memory?  And if we deny the value of history, must we also say the same of memory?    But I don't know that you can really keep asking questions like that in school...  

The gardening idea in the article seems more related to a Greek eudaimonic concept of flourishing, which for some I think means "letting be" as much as it might mean to others "working at virtue", virtue being, for some, a key idea in that concept.

The joy of eudaimonia seems to be how variously "living well" can be interpreted. Pleasure and health in variety reminds me of the response I received from a DJ last week. I was trying to decide which milongas to go to in the Netherlands next month.  I wrote to various DJs: I see you are DJing on <date> at <milonga name>. Can I ask, will that be traditional music, alternative or a mix? And if trad do you play mainstream or less well known tracks? Regards, etc. One who replied in straightforward Dutch manner rather took aback the Brit in me:  Too many questions, Felicity [if only he knew!]. 70 trad 30 Neo. Let yourself be surprised. No surprise that I was writing precisely because I don't like musical surprises in milongas.  I said nothing. Then he asked a few things, which is always nice, including whether I was especially interested in neo-tango music. I tried to be truthful but not provocative:

Re music I need trad music. I wish it were otherwise but sadly I don't get a dancing [tango] feeling for neo, I don't know why.

He replied, wonderfully :

happily we are not all the same.. :)

"The Gardener and the Carpenter"

Here is a simply lovely piece about a book: The Gardener and the Carpenter about social learning. I knew what it was going to be about from the title alone. There are so many parallels with the ideas some of us share about dancing tango and an approach to life generally: that it's about exploration and discovery not targeted on "levels" of development, that it's play, not work, that there is no right and wrong, simply what happens, that it's about growing, not building and that the skills that develop happen organically, in an emergent way and are thus stronger for it. Also, that we learn much by listening and observation, play and apprenticeship, which in dance terms means we can learn much just by attending a milonga and that beginners learn easily just by dancing (not being told what to do) with people who already can. No surprise that she calls the relationship between parent and child - or anyone - an interplay, "like dancing".

Cortinaless

Today, I came across a discussion in an online group about practicas - there was a query about why women were not attending which although I don't know this practica I tend to find is because the guys aren't nice to dance with. There was a worry from an organiser that perhaps events may not run without sufficient support. There were some calls for "no cortinas" from women not getting dances and for men to be more generous with themselves. There were cries to the contrary too - about dance being a pleasure, not a chore. I said I would rather die than accept or give something as patronising and demeaning as a charity dance. But there's nothing "charity" about dancing with beginners for me - it's often a great pleasure.

Increasingly I avoid practicas without cortinas. The music tends to be poor and attracts people who care about moves more than music. 

I feel music in tandas and find it uncomfortable when a partner I'm dancing with hasn't heard the change of orchestra. They may expect to keep on dancing but for me a change of orchestra is a natural end point, signifying a change of partner or a pause. Cortinas make thing clear and easy without anything being said - just like invitation by look. 

There is nothing about tandas with cortinas that prevents anyone from dancing the last one or two tracks whereas to take away the advantages of tandas with cortinas from those who enjoy them will increase the likelihood of such dancers escaping this discomfort by going elsewhere. Some choose who they invite or accept and when. Others try to make them dance with more people through such tactics as "no cortinas" or gimmicks like "move on one partner" which luckily is increasingly less common. 

Cortinaless practicas detract in several ways but how do cortinas detract except by some thinking others are having more fun than they? It isn't logical to think having no cortinas mean people will dance with you more. If someone doesn't want to dance with someone else, what difference do cortinas make? The only thing no cortinas does is cave in to the demands of people who can't get dances for a single "pity" dance which is so embarrassing as to be almost unanswerable. No cortinas doesn't make it more likely that someone will dance with you except by making the indignity obvious that they may grant you one track but couldn't bear to do three.

I really feel for women who can't get dances or the dances they want - because very often that person has been me!   I don't know what to say to that except that in my experience things get worked out in the milongas, one way or another. You find out eventually what it is to be nice to dance with, you find out who you trust to find those things out with and who you don't because trust in dance as in conversation is all there is really.  And these things just can't be forced, least of all "encouraged" by well meaning people with the wrong end of a very delicate stick.

If I want to dance one or two tracks with a woman or I think that's all I might get from her on a first shot, I'll invite her at the end of a tanda - or I might be so invited. It makes things clear with nothing having to be said: "I'm not sure enough about you to dance a whole tanda, but do you want to give a couple of tracks a try?" Even that can be a fairly unsubtle, patronising and insulting thing to do. It can imply "I don't know if you're good enough for me" though it could also mean "You may be out of my league". Either way, such a risk might not be worth taking. 

Usually - though not always - I dance tandas. Surely the only time you might tend to dance one or two tracks is if you don't know someone or the music is poor for part of the tanda. Dancing a single track or even two there is no time to get to know someone, to get over nerves, or perhaps one of the tracks wasn't the best so you didn't dance well. With the traditional four tango tracks to a tanda there is time to get a good idea about somebody, particularly a nervous somebody, time to adjust and accommodate or lose your own nerves in the pleasure of the music and the new partner.

Places that lose cortinas are likely to also end up losing the dancers who have no trouble getting partners and who enjoy the natural rhythm of tandas with cortinas. The dancers who demand no cortinas of hosts may wish for that but ultimately it results in a two-speed community where, in general, the better dancers will dance in a different local milonga with people who can dance and who prefer tandas and cortinas and those who can't get dances won't go. They will go to the cortinaless practicas they wanted, to dance with...others who can't get dances or who like the off-on, stop-start emptiness of single track dancing and where, really, is the fun in that?  Or, those who can dance will and do travel away from such places or stop dancing if their circumstances prevent travel. 

In contrast, a healthy milonga has good music, tandas and cortinas; good physical milonga conditions like seats, tables and good lighting for invitation by look; a naturally pleasant host who helps create the kind of floorcraft that attracts good dancers and an atmosphere without overt rules which is as relaxing as the music such that good dancers will naturally dance with new dancers. All this happens in the real conditions of a real milonga.  I think it is in these kinds of places that new dancers grow, experienced dancers develop and everyone has a good time not in some cortinaless false kindergarten-like simulacrum of a milonga.

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I am not against practicas at all though I notice better dancers will usually prefer a milonga if they have one so the trouble with practicas can be insufficient experienced dancers to dance with newer dancers.  For me, good practicas are just less formal milongas where people can try things out in the middle without getting in the way of others, or dance with a smaller group of more known people, where they feel safer.

A good practica might be a little different to a milonga.  But to be a real practice, a practice for a milonga it would, obviously, be very close to it which is another reason it would have cortinas.  But maybe in a practica it would be OK to stop and start and try things out, to talk (but oh, please, still not lecture new dancers) on the floor. Men can learn how to dance by dancing in the traditional woman's role with experienced partners of either sex. Men would feel less self conscious about this than in a milonga - until it becomes more common and therefore more natural for men to learn this way, rather than by learning set moves in class.  That makes most of them  unpleasant to dance with and worse makes them treat women as little better than performing dogs to jump through hoops. If your practicas are full of men like this, little wonder when women do not go. 

Most women are nicer to dance with than most men. But when men can dance, even more women become nicer to dance with, just like that.  

Yet it is perfectly possible for brand new women to learn to dance with good partners in milongas.  It happens all the time.  Such women are easily the nicest I dance with and the most unspoilt by class contrivance.  So if women can learn this natural way, why can't guys swap roles and learn that same way too? Because guys who know what dancing like a woman feels like are so much nicer to dance with.  I'm not saying there's no place for a practica, just that everyone, everyone can learn and enjoy an awful lot implicitly in a good milonga - and often hardly even notice the learning.