A friend once gave me an analogy for life that stuck with me… we live life from two perspectives. One, on the dance floor. The other, from the balcony.

When you’re on the dance floor, you’re caught up in the experience. You’re seeing the view in the moment, with no foresight or hindsight to guide. You are the epitome of being present. This is the view I’ve resided in for a huge part of my life…living in the moment. Relishing in the experience. It can be a great time, the dance floor of life.

But it can also be a detrimental time. You spend so much time dancing that you neglect the things you aren’t looking at…the things you don’t have the perspective to see. Things in the peripherals become messy and spill inward. Before long, you look around and realize you’ve danced yourself to blisters and blood. What once glittered and glamoured now has left nothing but grime and grit. The dance floor has a dark side, as any former party kid can attest.

And you can see this from the balcony. You can see the dance floor and the people on it. You can interpret their experience. Judge the trajectory of it. Analyze who those dancers on the dance floor are. All based on the perspective you get being on the outside. This position gives you a lot of insight. It provides a lot of learning through those insights.

But you can spend a lifetime watching the dance floor, interpreting the dance floor, but never really experience life ON the dance floor.

The balcony is a protected position. One that offers a lot of benefits. From up there, you're not at risk of falling on your face...or getting hurt in other ways. You can stand back and remove yourself from those likelihoods. Avoid vulnerabilities that come from baring your rawest parts. But you can’t fully understand the dance floor from the balcony… or the people on it. How could you? You miss so much from that vantage.

My Libra sensibilities tell me that extremes are never the best way…one gets the fullness of an experience by having them both. You need the perspective of the balcony, so you can know when it’s time to dance on the floor— and when it’s time to get off it.

But you also need that time dancing in life, experiencing the joy of the moment and the freedom of being present, authentic, and unabashed.

I think about this metaphor often now, as I go about my life. I am acutely aware of the ways I have lived on the dance floor to a detriment. How not looking closer at what was ahead or behind shaped my life experience.

I also see how those experiences have shaped me into the dancing creature I am today. Flexible, creative, intuitive. I have taken these dance floor experiences and learned how to cultivate them into my own rhythm—- even when some of the songs weren’t my favorite, I could keep pace. Those dance floor experiences shaped me…for the better and the worse.

I’m older now. Trying to be wiser. I’ve been working on being more cognizant of the ways I’m existing. I want to live a life I can look back on with a light heart and clear conscience. And I’ve spent time on the balcony, to be able to see those aspects clearer. I appreciate the view of my life now.

The balcony has been a saving grace. I’m wiser for the perspective. But I’ll always find myself back on the dance floor. I have cultivated my soul to find the flow that comes from being out there. I am grateful for my wild soul, and the dances that grew it so. I am called to dance because it’s there that I am most at home. And most alive.