Movement is more valuable than gold. We hail professional athletes for their agileness, we stand in awe of dancers who captivate our stare, and we pay the medical and fitness industry to keep us as mobile as possible, and yet we don’t think a lot about the actual value of movement.
To move one’s body is one of the greatest, and most unappreciated gifts we could have been given by life. Watch any great dancer and you too will see the ineffable beauty, art, and expression that can be communicated through motion. Movement can change you forever, both your own movement and that of others. I will forever be changed by the live nighttime ballet performance that I stumbled upon in a renaissance Florentine piazza last month in Italy. One dancer moved me so deeply in his interpretation of the Requiem for a Dream ballad, with his shadow outlining the ancient stone walls of the piazza behind him, that I literally had to grasp my chest to breathe. The rush of his uncontainable passion united with the fluid admiration of the crowd was indescribable. It was something that only movement can capture.
Motion is powerful, so start appreciating it for what it is. Last night at a nightclub in Richmond, I danced. And while my uninhibited movements cannot compare to my Italian male ballerina, we are both celebrating life – its emotions, its joys – and the message that we both communicate through movement is inexpressible in words.
Whatever you do, just remember that you can’t buy movement because you already have it. It’s free and at our constant disposal, so celebrate it and move.