This weekend I rekindled an old flame, swing dancing. I’d been catching myself tapping my foot whenever I heard a swing tune, and had been meaning to dig out the suede shoes. On Friday night a fifteen-piece orchestra from Cambridge came to play at the Plaza Theatre, and it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up.

Watching the dancers jitterbugging on the floor, the moves seemed familiar but I couldn’t remember their names, or the signals the leader would give me to initiate them, or how indeed to execute them. Likewise, those faces I had danced with so often were all familiar, but their names were gone.

I sat there trying to remember how to get out of a tandem Charleston, when to my horror someone asked me to dance. However my body remembered everything, and it was uncanny how it unconsciously responded to my partner’s signals. Mind you, thank God I wasn’t leading, cause my head still had no idea what my body was doing. It was like being possessed, in a rapturous way.

I sat back down ecstatic and out of breath. By the end of the night I was left with another forgotten but familiar feeling, that of walking out onto the street tired, dishevelled and sweaty at the wee hours.

It is said that whatever we learn (with our brains) is vulnerable to interference by subsequent events. This is why if you learn something, then sleep for eight hours, you’ll remember it better than if you had spent the intervening hours awake.

I wonder how much my mind’s incessant chattering, worrying, planning, imagining and wondering about details keeps me from retaining anything important, not to mention keeps from just doing rather than analyzing. Meanwhile, my kind muscles are happy to just sit, run, mouseclick, type and catch the odd frisbee. Once again I find myself wishing I could get my inner voice to just shut up and go with the flow.