Forgetful Souls of Tango

It is easy to forget who we are sometimes! This is worse than forgetting who others are. These may sound odd but let us take it a step further for now and things may come into focus soon.

Tango is a great equaliser. Our socio-economical standing in our world away from the dance floor is meaningless in tango. Everyone can forget about their own positions, influences, and any other additional positive values that they can bring to others or the effect that they may be able to exert to affect others whom they care for or even dislike. In tango, all these lose their colours. They become redundant and irrelevant issues because what comes into play is a lot more personal in tango.

Dancing tango is the process of placing emotions into motions. Movements determine our influences. The barriers are suddenly more about the nature of techniques than the operation of tactics. All these, of course, oppose the normal rules by which we live our lives.

And this is where and how the problems begin. The majority of us end up in this pleasant dreamy world of tango where we forget "the real world" - the one which we live in. We lose touch with all that grey reality where its many shades of grey are never ending. There are of course some among us who don't!

There are some among us who dance tango for the exact same reasons as they do everything else in life. It is just another activity in life. They attend to it as abother strategic move in life. Their strategy is always to gain a competitive edge - one up on everyone else.

They compete. The prizes and goals for them are exactly what they have always been with other competitions in life; it is not the elevation of their souls that they are after but the elevation of self. Tango is therefore just another vehicle for them, just like any other, something that they can use in order to get to their destination.

So when I say "we forget who we are and that this is even worse than when we sometimes forget who others are", I am not talking of forgetting people's names.

Forgetting names is one of those faults that many of us suffer from with some shame. I, myself, am included in this group. I can try and justify my forgetfulness by explaining it away, by saying "it is one of many consequence that arise from meeting so many people", but I truly think my memory is getting more lazy as the sheer number of people I meet, in my non-tango life, grows daily. I have even developed this bad habit of looking for a name tag or a badge on peoples' front whenever I am in a social group meeting. In tango, no one has yet dared to suggest that we should all bring a name badge along!

So let me go back again to reiterate that it is not "the names". A name is simply an identity of few letters. Something we usually inherit from our parents. Our names may or may not be unique. They may be very common and frequent but the names do not differentiate us, they simply mark us. What separate us from everyone else are our souls.

The term Soul here has no religious connotation for me but it references our personality, the actual mind and mentality. It is who we are and the vision of the world around us which we take in and project out.

Away from the tango scene we have some idea how to deal with the world. There are some who we like and some whom we dislike. A touch is a touch, a smile is a smile, a look is a look and a distance is what it is.

We can open up to or close ourselves from others in our daily lives. The reasons could be many or a few, or at the very least just one - but a significant one. There always has to exist some reason because it never is due to 'none'.

We may take a like or dislike to some people because they either do or do not fit or conform or submit to our will, desire and wishes. We associate with those who reflect us or the image that we perceive of ourselves in their mind.

Whatever our reasons are, they are always the same. Our personal rules apply to all with equal intensity. If we don't like the sad, the silly, or the clever or the ones who for example wear 'purple colour tops' then we have our natural responses to them: distancing ourselves.

Our reactions usually surface naturally. As soon as the conditions are present we often behave in a predictably routine and systematic way.

Now this is where it becomes confusing because most of us disengage ourselves from those rules and just follow our souls while some actively recognise this and engage in their own mind games and look for their prey.

On a milonga floor quarries are so many, and the hunter is not a tiger; I can personally promise you that!

MilongaCat.
The only cat who loves you back!