Zumba

For the last several months, I have been attending a twice weekly zumba class at my local gym. For the uninitiated, zumba is the grooviest exercise you will ever do. It is a mixture of Latin and hip-hop dance done to a mixture of Latin and hip-hop music. The ratio of Latin to hip hop depends upon the instructor. The instructor I favor leans a bit more heavily to hip-hop music, which is one of the many reasons I love this particular class.

I have always believed that I have no innate rhythm. If you were to observe me in zumba class you would reach the same conclusion. My body has never seemed to move in any coordinated fashion when dancing. Asking my arms and legs to do different things is like kryptonite - I end up just staring and figuring out how on earth bodies move that way. Yet in zumba I have found a part of myself that I did not know exist.

I realized recently that much of what I do in this life is in opposition to my mother. I love my mother dearly and think she is a wonderful lady; however, I seem to act contrary to what she would. She loves to dance, and won several dance contests as a young woman. When I was a young woman, you could not get me to dance or go to a dance. I think I went to a grand total of 3 dances in my teenage years, and 2 of those were prom (neither of which I danced at). Dance was my mom's thing, not mine. I had no interest in it or see any need for dance in my life. Once I realized that I was prejudiced against zumba for no logical reason, I decided to start going.

I have to admit the first time few times I went to zumba I had to talk myself into returning the next time. Some of the dances felt weird (well, all of the dances) and I felt like a huge idiot. Yet there was something that drew me in. For an hour at a time, I was someone else. I learned to stop paying attention to what I was doing and started just feeling the music and the beat. Not to say that I always find the beat, but I at least now know that a such thing as beats exist.

Now I go with no apologies and dance like the craziest, most uncoordinated girl out there. I could care less that I am a few beats behind everyone else and that the dance I am doing bears little relation to what the instructor intended. Zumba has become my time to be a different Leigh Ann. A Leigh Ann who dances for the sheer joy of it, even on the days that threaten to suck all the joy out of my soul. I become the girl who would have swayed her hips at the boys at the club, if I had ever been the club kind of girl. I forget for an hour all the worries, the stresses, the ordinariness of life. For a bit, life is colorful and exuberant and fresh. So I dance and embrace the Leigh Ann that zumba is teaching me to become.