The Useless Dancer

There is an old story, told by the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, about a carpenter named Shih who was traveling through the state of Qi. Along the road he passed a village shrine, and beside it grew an oak tree of almost unbelievable size — a trunk so wide it would take dozens of men joining hands to circle it, branches thick enough to build a dozen boats, a canopy so broad that crowds gathered beneath it the way people gather at a fair. Shih's apprentice stood and stared, the way anyone would. But the carpenter himself barely slowed his pace. Useless wood, he said. A boat built from it would sink. A coffin would rot before its time. Furniture would ooze sap forever and never hold its shape. There was nothing to be made from this tree, which was exactly, he said, why it had been allowed to grow so old.

That night, the oak appeared to Shih in a dream. It did not protest his judgment so much as turn it over and show him its other side. What is it you're measuring me against? it seemed to ask. The fruit trees — the cherry, the pear, the orange — are stripped and broken every season by hands reaching for what they produce. Their usefulness is the very thing that shortens their lives; they rarely get to finish the years given to them. The oak, by contrast, had spent decades failing every test of utility, and in failing, had simply been left alone to become enormous, ancient, itself.

My mom told me the story of the Useless Tree, and I think about it from time to time.

The weight of becoming

Many of us develop some kind of ambition in dance over time, whether it's self-initiated or influenced by the ambition of our peers. Maybe we want to perform eventually. Maybe we want to be asked to dance, and asked again. Maybe we just want to get "better" — to hear the music more clearly, to lead or follow with more honesty, to refine a single movement until it stops feeling like an approximation of itself. None of this is a flaw. Wanting to grow is one of the more decent things a person can want.

But ambition has a way of casting a shadow. A faint tally running somewhere in the back of the mind during a social... how many times was I asked, how long did people dance with me. A small disappointment when a dance ends earlier than you'd like. An itch of comparison with whoever danced before, or whoever is dancing now, a few feet away -- with someone you want to dance with because they're a more experienced or famous dancer. A sense that the evening ought to return something — a connection, a moment, a small proof of progress — to be worth spending on.

Somewhere in there, without anyone deciding it, the dance and the social dance floor environment quietly turns into a project. And a project, by its nature, is a thing that has a start and an end.

What the tree refused

The useless oak never tried to win an argument with the fruit trees. It didn't measure its branches against the ship's mast the pine would become, or envy the temple beam the cedar was destined for. It simply continued growing into whatever shape its own crookedness suggested, and in doing so, became something none of the useful trees ever had the chance to be — Old. Whole. Unbroken by the very thing that might have used it up.

There is, I think, a way of dancing that resembles this. It doesn't aim at improvement. It isn't collecting evidence of itself to review later. It isn't performing in any way, even for an audience of one. It's simply present for the length of a song because the music is happening and the body is here, and that's all there is — just the shift of weight, the breath, the unremarkable fact of two people moving through the same stretch of time together.

What might happen when we exercise the idea of not letting the dance be defined entirely by what it leaves behind? Perhaps we may be open to and accept dances as they are, with a greater range of people -- regardless of their technique, their experience, or their mobility.

It's worth sitting with what it might actually feel like to move through an evening without a goal pinned to it anywhere — not trying to improve, not hoping to be noticed. Just being there, inside each song as it arrives and passes, the way the oak was simply there in its field.

For most of us, it doesn't come easily. We are so well trained to make our hours count — that the idea of three hours spent moving to music and walking away with a goal unachieved can feel almost like not making progress.

But the oak was never nothing. The oak was alive, in the fullest and least negotiable sense of the word — and that turned out to be enough.

The use of being useless

Zhuangzi's tree was never an argument that usefulness is bad. The fruit trees were not wrong to bear fruit. The point (if there is one) is only that the oak survived because it refused to be reduced to whatever use someone might find for it. The carpenter saw timber going to waste. The travelers, gathered underneath it, saw shade. The tree itself simply went on being a tree.

So perhaps, the next time you catch yourself at a social caught between the wish to dance well and the small, familiar disappointment of not quite managing it — you might let one song go by in which you are, for its duration, entirely useless. Not improving. Not being watched. Not even trying, particularly, to be anything at all.

Just existing in the music, the way a tree stands in a field, growing into whatever shape the moment asks of you.