Decay

In which I rummage around my brain looking for circuit breakers and shed light on new things.

It is not popular to talk about change in terms of decay. Decay is a natural process of change—unavoidable, constant—but capitalist hustle culture favours more flamboyant change. Change you can get behind. Change you can make a project out of. Change you can make a name for yourself by initiating or being part of.

Decay is not a sexy project, it just happens, constantly. All change involves loss as well as gain but decay is just loss so we don’t showcase it. We allow ideas, initiatives, processes, products, and best practices to shrivel on the vine in favour of bright-looking new ones. Often when I am in the initial audit phase of my consulting work, I unearth ideas, materials, and projects that clients abandoned but which give important clues about what’s needed now.

What if decay was not seen as loss? What if we consider it instead as a kind of reorganization?

From green leaf to yellow, to brown, to mulch, to nutrients that feed a new form of life. All the constituent parts of something—the atoms, fibres, energetic connections—deteriorating in their current forms to become something else, or several other things. That’s worth paying attention to, being curious about what happens next, and how and why.

Until the pandemic, I taught a style of partner dance called West Coast Swing. In an average week I would spend 5-10 hours teaching it in different ways—group classes, private lessons, workshops, teaching others to teach it—in addition to many hours of my own practice. I’m only now beginning to teach it again after a full 4 years of not teaching at all, and almost as much time not dancing it.

As I wander through the mechanical room of my dance-teaching brain looking for the right circuit breakers to turn back on, I am fascinated by the deterioration that has occurred.

Reassembling the toolbelt

Teaching used to be like wearing a big, fabulously equipped tool belt. I had acquired so many tools and was a whiz at using most of them. I knew the location of every one of them and which was best to pull out for what purposes. I could juggle several tools at once, combine their use, and find new uses for them in the moment. It was a thrill, it felt like mastery, I was so proud of that toolbelt and my own dexterity.

Now, I go searching for the tools—figuratively and literally. 

Figuratively, the tips, tricks, concepts, explanations, and exercises I used to be able to draw on in an improvisational way are no longer front-of-mind or tip-of-tongue. They bubble up slowly from the murky depths of memory. When they finally arrive in useful forms, they tend to appear in a sub-optimal order. I try them out one at a time and slowly reconstruct how best to combine and present them. My students are gracious and patient, I feel fortunate.

Literally, I am reassembling my teaching toolkit. Today I unearthed some rubber resistance bands of varying sizes that I find useful for teaching certain concepts. I found them in the back corner of a bin I had not opened for years. Some had nearly disintegrated and they snapped into bits as I tried to use them, tried to remember how I used to use them, and experimented to come up with a new way that I want to use them. I spent more time finding, culling, and organizing them, then cutting new ones than I spent actually playing with them.

Getting clearer

Although I wasn’t exactly prepared for this challenge when I decided to attempt teaching again, it’s had some advantages. Because I am slower to use the tools now, I reconsider every one of them. In the process, I’ve realized that I don’t want to use some of them anymore, or not in the ways I used to. Certain things are much clearer to me now than they were before. Concepts and tools that I used to take for granted I now have questions about and am beginning to ask those questions of others. Whatever I learn, it will make me a better teacher because I will be more clear about things. It is exciting to see a path ahead, to feel that I can become an evermore efficient and effective communicator and guide.

At first, recognizing the deterioration in my teaching faculties was alarming. I spent months questioning whether it was even responsible for me to return to teaching, whether I had anything to offer. But it also motivated me to review 20 years’ worth of notes from my training as well as all my past teaching notes and class plans.

Perhaps for the first time, I understood the story of my own dance. I could trace how concepts explored over time and across many coaches and mentors have come to shape me. 

It’s giving me a new approach and perspective—something valuable for anyone with expertise in a topic to experience. While I wouldn’t recommend a pandemic or an excessively long break from something you care deeply about, I can vouch for the benefits of time away from it to see what naturally decays and what new fruit sprouts.

Many of us got that opportunity during 2020 - 2021 (and perhaps longer). If you let go of something that was important during that time, what do you find when you return to examine it once more?