Remember cassettes? Those little compact plastic boxes that held a spool of analog magnetic tape? If you wanted to skip from one song to another you had to use the fast-forward or rewind buttons on your tape player.

Well, cassettes (and videotapes for that matter) are for the most part history, but the vernacular lives on — the terms fast-forward and rewind are here to stay.

Wouldn’t it be cool if life came with some sort of a button like that? Not to actually speed it up or slow it down per se, but rather to zoom in and out of the big picture so to speak.

To quote Jaron Lanier, “You Are Not a Gadget!” We don’t come equipped with knobs or dials. You’ve probably met someone whose ‘buttons’ were easily pushed, but that’s a topic for another day.

By the very nature of being part of the human family, you exist in a constellation of other people. If you broaden your perspective and look at them in a certain light, you may find something of a cosmic crystal ball or metaphysical time machine right there in clear view.

My line of thinking here began with a sidelong glance at myself in the mirror. I have a photo on the mantle of my dearly departed Dad when he was in his early 20s. It barely resembles the old guy I knew so well in his later years. But when I saw myself in the mirror out of the corner of my eye, I realized that we share an incredible likeness across time and space.

Lately, I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with folks near my own age hanging out with their much-older parents. By exercising a bit of mental yoga it was easily possible to imagine them all 30 or 40 years younger having a similar conversation. The bodies and faces evolve over time, but the mannerisms and social dynamics remain the same.

Pondering this, I put my attention on some teenagers from the same family. Assuming fortune favors me with a long life, I will one day know these youngsters as grownups, and I’ll be the old guy cracking jokes. Trying to peek at their future selves through the lens of their current youth is a fascinating thought experiment.

Compared to a small mammal like a hamster, our lifespans are long. A giant tortoise might think our time here on earth is brief. Regardless, we exist in a chain of being, taking our turn to pass the baton from one generation to the next.

The idea of moving for greater awareness applies to more than just our dancing bodies. When we let our minds be limber we can peek through the portals of time and space as easily as pressing “Play” —  the most important button of all.

À bientôt!

M+

Mark Metz
Director of the Dance First Association
Publisher of Conscious Dancer Magazine