I have two left feet.

“I have two left feet.”

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that sentence in my life. Probably enough to start seriously wondering whether anatomy works quite the way we were taught at school.

People usually say it in the doorway, before the music, before the first step, before they’ve even tried. A little warning: don’t expect too much from me.

And it always makes me smile, because the feet are rarely the problem. More often, we don’t want to look silly, we don’t want the person next to us to pick things up faster, and we’re used to going through life mostly knowing what we’re doing.

Then we walk into a dance studio and suddenly have no idea where our left foot is going.

Adults really don’t like being beginners

Children seem much wiser about this. A child will try, get it wrong, fall, get up and do it again. They won’t decide after three minutes: “I don’t think this is really for me.”

We adults will.

We come to our first class, get two steps wrong and we’re already apologising to our partner, the teacher, the group, almost to the music itself.

“Sorry, I’m honestly hopeless.”

And perhaps seven minutes have passed.

I suppose we spend so much of our lives feeling we ought to know what we’re doing that it becomes uncomfortable to find ourselves still learning something.

But to me, that’s where it gets interesting. Not when everything comes easily, but when you let yourself struggle for a while. When you allow yourself to make a mistake, laugh at yourself, try again and not have to be good straight away.

That’s why I’ve grown fond of the words “I have two left feet”. Because most of the time, all they mean is:

“I’ve never done this before, and I’m a little afraid of how I’ll look.”

And that’s absolutely fine.

No one arrived at their first class already a dancer.

We all had to take that first step once.

Ivan Mileusnić