Let’s start with the comparison: An invitation to dance, that’s a way how relationships between people can be created.
An invitation to dance doesn’t have to be accepted. Everybody who made the experience of a conventional dancing lesson knows that. The person you asked might not want to dance, you turn down or you are turned down, for whatever reason. Maybe the other person does not like you, maybe the other person just doesn’t feel like dancing or promised somebody else the next dance.
Just like this, an invitation to dance in a relationship might or might not be rejected: The reached out hand is accepted, a mutual step is searched, the rhythm is found. You swing and turn together, release each other, find back to each other. Mimic, gesture, movement, speed merge in a music of life.

When we meet somebody, a stranger or a friend, we offer our hand to dance. If it is accepted, it might be left open how many dancing steps will be achieved. Afterwards the daily routine of relationships may continue or a deeper relationship can develop. But the dance together – no matter how short it was – created bonds, we tasted happiness together.

With respect for the other person, I shake hands with him: I ask a question, address a topic, dare to reveal myself:

Obviously I cannot waltz in a busy shopping street. It has to be right, adequate. Adequate for the situation, the person, the time we have. And every dance starts with the first step, then the second and not everything at the same time.

An example:
I had missed the last bus. My only option was taking a taxi. After a few minutes driving, I asked my taxi driver a common question, for how long we had been working in this job. For 16 years, he answered, but he was already 66 and thus had worked somewhere else before. He actually liked this job. But now he started getting old, the time passed by so much faster than in younger years. I asked him if he experienced this as something negative. Well, the end is coming closer, he said. He sounded quite gloomy to me.
I dared to asked directly whether he was afraid of it, of the end.
Now he got started. Well, he’d try to explain it to me. For he was interested in philosophy as he had been a teacher before.
During the remaining 15 minutes of the trip my driver tried to explain to me the three different perspectives of what it could be like after death by means of the apology of Socrates. I enjoyed following his dancing steps.

Nevertheless, it becomes more difficult to experience relationships as an invitation to dance when more people are involved. A “group dance” as relationship, that also exists but will remain the exception.

We were three people in a train compartment, randomly thrown together. One of them, a carpet dealer from Vienna, tried to make us acquainted. He was obviously thrilled about the mix that had come together in this night train from Amsterdam to Vienna which I had entered in Cologne. An older, more quiet guest worker from Turkey going back to his home country, me, a pretty young Christian psychologist at that time returning from a training, and he, a business man, ten years older than me with my 35 years, in my opinion experienced in society, with good manners, travelling home from Holland. Our conversation quickly turned to religion, a Muslim, a Christian and a humanist, as he called himself. His amazement at this international and cultural mix also caught me. He cleverly avoided that that it turned into a dialogue between me and him. And in the end he invited us to come and visit him in Vienna. And he actually gave us his card. He seemed to be serious about it. I was the first to get off, slightly numb from this unexpected round dance.

To experience relationships as an invitation to dance is more than a small talk, more than a chat about the weather, about general news.
To experience relationships as an invitation to dance is the beginning of a relationship, not yet the relationship, not yet a real relationship in which everybody experiences himself in a new way in the face of the other person.
It remains something playful, it is the movement together rather than the thing itself that gives it its charm. To laugh together, to be happy, to enjoy a glass of wine, to sit in the sun. Joie de vivre.
Humour offers a special way of dancing. He wants to take you by the hand and spread moments of liberating cheerfulness. A foretaste of the promised complete happiness.

Livinglifeasart Exercise:

“Learn to dance, otherwise the angles in heaven won’t know what to do with you.”
Augustine, 354-430, Doctor of the Church

“The humorist promenades within the infinity.”
Thomas Mann, 1875-1955, writer

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