I have spent the past two days attending the CRN Irish Dance
World Championships, in Wexford Ireland.
It is awesome to see so many brilliant Irish dancers, some as young as 9 or 10,
all of whom have pursued their dance with such dedication and focus that they
can qualify for the World Championships. I have a granddaughter among them, and
she did well.
Two things occurred to me over the long hours of watching
the competitions. The first was a
renewed confidence in the younger generation who are inheriting our planet. At a time when the daily news is filled with
stories of disaffected youth rioting in this or that part of the world, it is
comforting to see young people who are dedicated enough to put in the
proverbial 10,000 hours to become truly excellent at something very demanding
and difficult.
The second observation is simply wonder at the human mind
and human body. A dancer is recalling
and executing an intricate sequence of hundreds or thousands of individual high
speed steps or movements while keeping time to an auditory signal (music beat)
while keeping spatial awareness (position on stage and relative to other
dancers on the stage) while maintaining balance in a gravity field while
shifting body support rapidly from one foot to the other while remembering a
myriad of stylistic requirements (point the foot, keep the arms at the side,
etc, etc). And all this coordinated
by a relatively small mass of neural tissue in the brain and along the nerve
pathways.
We usually take all this for granted, in our daily life, in
sports, in dance, in acrobatics, etc.
But if one stops to really think about it, the amount of high-speed processing
going on is absolutely astounding.
The world around us is truly wonderful – truly awe-inspiring
– if one only stops occasionally to really look at it.
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