Mari Travels with Tango

Sitting in an airport cafe, watching the stream of tangueros walk past me on their way home, i find myself thinking about the natural evolution of everything in life. When the conditions are favourable and the mood positive, expansion and growth can be rapid. At the same time, the emotions felt make the experience deeper and the memories stronger, and this creates a positive loop that feeds even more meaningful encounters. The atmosphere of joy, trust and openness pulls mo re and more people in, and for a brief moment in time, it seems that everything is possible. But perhaps it is inevitable that after a peak there is always a decline. It may be experienced in the depth of emotions, in the intensity of sensations, or in the meaning that one assigns to interaction with others. Where one previously saw only beauty and harmony, one now notices cracks and dents that although not serious, make one ask oneself what has changed. Most importantly, one starts to drift further to the perime...

Although I have been single-mindedly immersed in many different activities before, the way that tango digs its claws into you is without parallel. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that most of us who become addicted to it came to its realm at an unhappy time of our lives: reeling from the pain of a separation, lost and looking for a direction in life, lonely and sad. At such dark moments, one is willing to take any consolation there is, and tango offers plenty. The possibility of losing yourself in the proximity of another desperado's embrace, the freedom from trying to express your needs and emotions in words, the comforting knowledge that nothing more than 12 minutes of commitment is expected of you, all seem the perfect panacea for the disappointment of having failed to understand and be understood in the outside life. It is not uncommon for newcomers to think that most, if not all, of life's hurdles could be avoided if everybody just took up tango.  😊 So...