When it comes to dancing I have a style all of my own. I’ve been told it resembles a body falling from a great height with limbs flailing in the false hope of actually flying. This doesn’t bother me because I enjoy leaping around to music and never worry about feeling shame because everyone else feels shamed on my behalf.
Currently I’m sitting in a small room with lots of jabbering mothers preening their daughters in preparation for an impending dance exam. My daughter is taking the exam too, but my wife is away which means I find myself shrinking amid the estrogen. Even my daughter appears at a loss regarding my presence. Fortunately there is a small boy sitting beside me who looks equally out of place, so we are both doing what all dislocated males do - we’re playing silently with our technology in the hope that we’ll blend with the wallpaper. The kid’s got a nintendo thingy and I’m typing this. I’m pleased to report that no-one is paying any attention to us, so it must be working.
The deep question I have is this, “Why can I dance around in public like a baboon in mating season and feel no shame, yet feel like a pervert when sitting quietly in a room full of women with their daughters and mine?” It must be some kind of latent insecurity. It may also be social engineering.
All of us have social filters of one sort or another. Most of the time we know what’s appropriate and what’s not. However we only know appropriate behaviour if we are familiar with the context. When we find ourselves in unfamiliar surroundings all our social filters go into a state of seizure.
I’ve recently seen this at work. A group of women in our church invited the local cardiac resuscitation trainer to educate them on the basic points of CPR. This required a change from drinking coffee and talking to lying on the floor to be physically rolled over, pumping on the chest of an expensive looking blowup doll and then giving it the kiss of life. Interestingly no one seemed comfortable to do this in public. Yet despite being the difference between learning to save a life or watch someone die, people’s social filters initially stood in the way. Fortunately, once two or three people made spectacles of themselves, it became socially acceptable to do so and everyone had a go.
Inasmuch as we might think we are independent thinkers, the sad reality is very different. The eyes of those important to us will dictate how we live our lives more than we think. The question is, “Who are we trying to impress?”
The Psalmist wrote, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. Fear in this sense is respect as opposed to terror. It’s a way of saying that living well for self and others is determined by who is most important to us. If God has endowed us with life, then the best lived life is enacted with God as the audience, not everyone else.
Digby Wilkinson, 2009