time and tango

I've been living in a different time zone for a while. Technically speaking I'm still operating on Pacific Standard Time like everyone else in Vancouver, but there's been a shift in my experience of it. Even though there are twenty-four hours in the day and sixty minutes in every hour and sixty seconds in every minute (and why 60 and not something even and metric like 100?), time expands and contracts for me in ways that are entirely independent of the rotation of the planet around the sun.

I work. A lot. I had two days off in all of February. Two so far this month. I worked twelve to sixteen hours a day for a couple of weeks. I take the time to work out pretty much every day, and I remember to eat, but for the rest, the working hours fly by. When you're trying to be hyper-productive, the passage of time seems more intense. The tick-tock rhythm of an hour is replaced with a more pressing stacatto rhythm, an urgent pace, pressing, pressing, pressing. It's exhausting.

The thing that saved me in these past weeks was tango. In spite of the long work hours, I only missed two milongas in the last month or so. Tango creates a place, a space where time strangely expands for me. Fatigue falls away, and even though my body is moving to the lilting strains of the bandoneon, it's as if time stands still. (The irony there is, of course, that however luscious it is, tango music like any music is as markedly bound by time as the hands of a clock.) Maybe it's because tango music weaves together all that is tragic and all that is beautiful about love and life, so that the polar opposites balance each other and thus generate a poignant inertia. Maybe it's because I'm so utterly possessed by my body when I dance that my brain, accustomed as it is to being in charge, has to slip into neutral, like a manual transmission, just to avoid stripping the gears and the net result is a feeling of timelessness. Or maybe I'm just so desperate for a break that my mind plays tricks on me so that my few hours on the dance floor feel like a grand get-away to Buenos Aires. Honestly, I don't much care why tango twists my perception of time, I'm just glad it does. I don't understand phosphorescence either, but that doesn't bother me.

I know a couple of people who refuse to give me any sympathy for being tired because they know that I'm still going out to dance in spite of the long work hours. They don't get why I'd choose tango over sleep when I'm so tired. I know it doesn't make sense, but I also know that if my life were defined solely by working hours and time spent unconscious, I might just as well throw in the towel. I need truth and beauty in my life. I love my work, but there's got to be more. Thank God for tango.

A picture's worth a thousand words. See if time doesn't stand still for you when you watch this.

And, yes, while I don't look anywhere near that polished and my boléos are less dramatic and I don't have red shoes (yet) and the spotlight is never on me nor is the lighting ever that dramatic, I can do this. And, yes, it's that delicious. (Especially when I dance with Lucio or The Russian. Sigh.)