Fifteen Minutes: Endpaper: Stepping to Success

I want to join CityStep. Don't get me wrong; no one has ever mistaken me for a red-headed Ginger Rogers or anything. My friends loudly snicker whenever I set foot on a dance floor, and that's my friends. But watching my roommate last spring step ecstatically with her kids got me itching to jump right in, both left feet first.

I have the good fortune to live with two women whose idea of having fun is making up complicated step routines on the T platform while waiting for the inbound train. That being said, they get a little frustrated when it takes me a slow transfer at Park Street to learn five consecutive moves. They tell me that I should stick with writing. After all, you don't have to move your feet much to do that.

But despite this lack of support and patient teaching, my passion for stepping only keeps growing. For one thing, stepping just looks so cool. Okay, maybe me stepping doesn't look particularly cool, but CityStep still has this incredible hold over me. I try out new rhythms on my way to the Crimson, and late at night I try the occasional little clap-kick-step in my room. I hold out hope that somewhere inside of me is an incredibly coordinated, cool and spunky stepper.

But of course, when it comes down to it, I'll never do CityStep.

At the same time, it's equally unlikely that one of my stepping friends will ever become a Golden Gloves Champion. Still, for the past three semesters, she has made pledge after pledge to join the Harvard Boxing Club. We walk past the office in the MAC on the stairway landing, and her eyes light up with a familiar yet eerie gleam of devilish interest. A few moments later, she's punching her way up the steps to our room in Leverett, holding her arms up in victory Rocky Balboa-style as she reaches our door.

You see, I'm not alone late at night when I'm working on my city-steps--she's there right next to me in the mirror, practicing her right hook. And beside her is my other roommate who's learning Arabic, right next to the one who's attempting a plié. Watching us in our common room, one begins to wonder what possesses Harvard students like us to indulge in these secret passions? What makes them think that deep inside them there is a ballerina/boxer/multi-linguist waiting to break free?

Perhaps it's our hubris. "Hey, I've been pretty good at everything so far, why not this?" Or maybe it's a rebellion of sorts against our true talents. An, "I'm going to do the thing that everyone told me I sucked at."

A brand of perversity exists behind the desire to drop everything you've devoted your life to up until now in favor of something that you are uniquely unsuited for. What sort of person carries these unfulfilled passions inside of them? What strange influence leads some of these people to actually act them out?

I have a guess. Many of us at Harvard are finely honed specialists at whatever craft we practice. We are here in part because we became experts in our respective fields. We have become giants in one part of our lives, while other personal traits clamor for attention like the seven dwarves around Snow White.

There are many arguments for being well-rounded. The one that I have come to respect most: If you don't pay at least cursory attention to the wide array of your personality attributes, you will invariably be consumed with a desire to exercise your most neglected talents. While, granted, they are perhaps neglected because you don't happen to have much talent at all in that area, if these aspects of your identity are never taken out for a twirl, they will sit like a sulky wallflower in the dance of your ego.

That is, of course, until the day when they become the life of your party. You will, one day, drop everything to devote all of your energy towards this thing--whatever it is--that has been eating at you.

Now, this is not to say that this is a good idea, especially if you plan on graduating. What will your parents say when you tell them, "Well, I really wanted to do CityStep, so now I have to devote eight hours a day to learning all the moves, which really doesn't leave much time for classes." Chances are, they won't be too pleased.

Of course, given the sensibilities of most Harvard students, you probably wouldn't do anything of the sort. Like me, you would quickly realize that you will never pursue that hidden passion in any serious manner. Like me, you will realize that CityStep is not in your future. And now, you will be at a crossroads, a fork in your life at which you have a very important decision to make. Will you stifle your dream? Or will you find some other, less time-consuming way to reach self-fulfillment?

Hopefully you'll follow the latter course, the course also the course less taken (kind of like Math 25). I, for instance, might take a swing dance class instead, or perhaps just shake my booty all night long at a long parade of formals in the spring. Or perhaps I'll simply continue to irritate my roommates by asking them to teach me that move just one more time.

You, well, you are different. Who knows what you will do? Frankly, you'll probably end up compromising in much the same manner. After all, you won't want to give up on your true passion, the one that makes you get up out of bed each morning even when you went to sleep just an hour before. CityStep is not (gasp!) the passion that drives my life. It is only the cry of my inner dancer, begging to get her moment in the spotlight.

But a moment does not make a lifetime, or even a career--a fact of which I'm sure even the most laid-back Harvardian is aware. I doubt I'll ever get to say, "See that Golden Gloves Champion'that's my roommate!" I also doubt that I'll ever go to Metropolitan to see my other friend dance. But as long as I get to laugh at them while they try out their punches and pliés, and we all get to collectively learn a line dance in the living room, I'll be content.

It's at college that we get to try out all the zany things that we know we might never pursue in our grown-up lives. But it's also here that we learn how to make choices about how to spend our time and expend our energy. I know there's a way to balance our true passions with our ill-fated pursuits, and I bet that Harvard students are smart enough to figure it out.

So on that note, let me know when you do. Until then, I'll still be secretly stepping (and tripping) into the wee hours of morning.

Meredith B. Osborn '01 is a social studies concentrator living in Leverett House. She is currently accepting applications for potential dance partners.