Being or becoming?

John Hain, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the very hard things in life is accepting things you don’t understand or you don’t agree with. 

I still find it difficult to understand why the salsa DJ doesn’t want to play the well-loved classics of salsa.  He said they were boring, but he also seemed to admit that they were well-loved when he said that the Latinos would sing them, not dance them. How can something be boring and well-loved at the same time? 

Tango DJs who don't play classics don't pose the same problem. After many years I believe they, probably unconsciously, generally want to be special in some way. In short it's an ego issue. They think it's about them more than the dancers. They think it is their job to educate dancers who come out to have fun. Or they simply do not hear and see what people love to dance, what the floor fills to and what it doesn't. Or some tango DJs - and there are many in this camp somehow - have somehow reconciled themselves, like the salsa DJ, to the contradiction that well-loved classics are boring.

But the way it was put to me, and made sense to me then and now is that The music is like a familiar and loved garden.

Why not apply the same beliefs about tango DJing to salsa? Because it's a different genre. Maybe things are different there...

Maybe the clue the salsa DJ won't play the classics is in the word "commercial". Maybe he thinks commercial means cheap, debased, "popular". But when it comes to social dance, what is popular works. It's the only thing, really that works as he himself recognised when he said that if he didn't play bachata, he wouldn't have enough people to run a club night.

The real point though is not about DJing or salsa or tango. These are just context, examples. The real point is a question: should we accept illogical things, not waste our time trying to get to the bottom of them? Or believe that at bottom, there is some logic if only we can find it and like some tenacious burrowing creature keep at it until we find it?

Is there virtue in trying to learn, to find out or in letting go? Maybe it’s not about virtue, just about how you’re built.  But then, should we accept how we are built or try to be some improvement on that?

Should we be, or should we become?