Becoming

Over this summer, my partner and I were lucky enough to take a private dance class with two of the very best Lindy Hop teachers in the world. We knew them to be wonderful people and also knew they were avid board gamers, but we weren’t expecting to receive possibly the best therapy that money can buy. I’ve long understood something of the relationship between how the body is held and moves and how the mind thinks and believes, but bloody hell did that get blown to a different dimension in that dance session.

It turns out, unsurprisingly to me, that for all of my adult life (I wasn’t so much like this as a kid) I have been very risk averse. At some point in my late teens or early twenties, I developed a tendency to only interact with what was comfortable. I have always had many spheres of interest and some ability in a few of them, so it has never felt very restrictive. More recently however, in my own personal endeavours, I noticed how hard it was to take an idea to its completion. Always something got in the way and dissolved what momentum was there. What got in the way? Lack of control. Or, I should say, the fear thereof.

I am a proficient Lindy Hop dancer. I am very comfortable to dance with. But it is this very comfort that I strive to give my partners that holds not only me back but the partnership as a whole. I want everything to go right, and I will do everything I can to help it go right, but more than that, and most importantly, I will only engage with something if I believe it will go right.

This realisation is massive for me, and the lesson is this: in relinquishing one kind of control, you gain another. For me, this means that if I let go of the need for everything to be 100% right, and therefore comfortable, I will learn to trust that whatever comes up in the future I will be able to deal with. Fear of the unknown is common, and until this realisation I would not have said that I did fear the unknown more than the next person, but now I know different. I did not trust myself enough to be able to handle what the future had in store, and so I kept everything within easy reach. Now it is time for me to let go, to trust in myself, and to trust my relationship with the world.

All of this is a very roundabout way of saying: I have finally committed to running my own board game company.

Let’s see what the future brings.

Thanks for reading,

Benjie x