Active peace

If there is a complexity in dancing tango - and this will depend on your perspective of what the dance is - it is emotional or psychological. Actually, "complexity", is a misnomer. It is just an apparent complexity.  Why then describe is as complex? Simply because we are not used to it and so it seems difficult or complex.

It is actually, as with steps in dancing tango, something simple. It not, though something most of us in our western societies practise much. It is being at peace in the moment, with another person, but in some active way.  Children have it.  I see it in photos of my boys as children, their easy intimacy, their shared movement, shared balance, their life in the moment. They are profoundly physically at ease with each other, as you can only be, sitting happily atop your brother's shoulders.

This emotional or psychological state that many find difficult or can take time to discover, is being at peace yet engaged with someone, perhaps a stranger in an embrace lasting long minutes. This "active peace" or "engaged peace" as I think of it, is similar to the way people describe yoga, or meditation, albeit, as far as I know, these are not usually done with a partner.  At the weekend I met someone who has practiced "Dances of Universal Peace" for about forty years who described something very similar.  

This same person mentioned they went to Quaker meetings.  They had investigated Buddhism and are spiritually most at home in Sufism. When, idly, I typed in "active peace" to Google, the first result returned was connected with the Quakers.  

What is this state, this active peace like?  It is feeling calm and delight in that synchronised movement with a partner to gorgeous music. It is being wholly in the moment, a peaceful focus on the other, on the music, on the joint movement, on the possibilities of movement opening and opening until they come to a natural close.  It is not being disturbed by unexpected things happening, but enjoying the opportunity of them. It is an understanding that some of the most profound, shared moments happen not even in the movement but in the stillness between the steps.

I add a caveat: when I am at last dancing in my heels with my very tall Spanish friend, who loves rhythmic music, I feel, finally, a rare, shared powerful energy which is not quite the same thing.  Maybe it is the flip side of the same coin: one side peace, the other energy, both though coming from a symbiotic engagement in the moment.