Sometimes there are coincidences that make life happening around me seem almost choreographed, like a ballet where each pose, each jump is decided beforehand, long before I get to see it. Saturday morning our son was doing funny-walk in the kitchen. He went back and forth in a way that reminded me of Charlie Chaplin, which I told him. I found a video clip of Charlie Chaplin walking that I showed to my son, and he thought it was very funny and we spent part of the morning together walking around the house like Charlie Chaplin.
Saturday afternoon we had applied to join a trial lesson in kids’ ballet. Our son loves to dance, we often dance together at home and we have been talking about trying some different activities for him to see what he enjoys doing, one of them being ballet. It was a small class, only three kids, and our son got to borrow both clothes and shoes and cautiously tried to follow the teacher’s instructions, doing stretches, jumping, skipping. When it became time to try a few ballet poses, and the teacher showed how to put the heels together and angle the feet outward as much as possible, our son’s face suddenly lit up and he happily said with a clear voice: just like Charlie Chaplin.
Sometimes there are coincidences that make life happening around me seem almost choreographed (although I find it difficult to even consider that possibility). But even if I would try to entertain the idea that the moment could be a result of an unseen hand painting a choreography, the question would anyway arise whether that particularly beautiful passage really was the inevitable conclusion of a pre written script, and not just the happy resolution of an improvised jump. No, the way I like to think of it is rather that the symmetries in life are the golden hooks where to hang the beauty of being alive – that to me is something of a sanguine thought. And hearing our son talking about Charlie Chaplin while doing the first position in ballet, is very happy memory.
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