Sometime last year my son put me onto a video at http://www.stridegum.com/#/mattsplace/  (the Dancing 2008 link) It’s a guy call Matt Harding who travelled around the world (including Dublin’s St. Stephen’s Green) with his girlfriend doing a silly dance. His girlfriend Melissa Nixon recorded Matt and the people (or monkeys) who joined him. The video lasts about 4 minutes. I found it again earlier this month and I’ve watched it every day since. I cry every time….. I wonder if I’ll ever be immune to its effect. 

 

I love the music, it’s playing as I write. I love Matt’s enthusiasm. I love his openness, lacking any embarrassment. I love the children. I love the people running in to dance. I love the bad dancers. I love the Bollywood dancers. I love the guy in the wheelchair. I love when it gets to Tel Aviv and then East Jerusalem, and I cry some more because they’re almost dancing together, they’re almost laughing together and they’re almost together.

 

I long to be so free that I could go to St. Stephen’s Green in the middle of Dublin and do my own silly dance, with a big smile on my face. But I’m afraid. Even imagining it makes my stomach knot and my face burn up with worry about what the people passing by would think.  

 

This guy, Matt has no fear, or seems to have no fear of what others might think (he is afraid of spiders though!). And that in some way is what makes him and his dance so attractive. He does the perfect silly “Matt Harding dance” and he has an impact on lots of people, he has an impact on me. What a simple way to have an impact.

 

Is there something simple that you want to do? Are you worried about what others would think? A passerby, your parents, your brother, your sister, your friends? What if what you wanted to do could have this kind of impact on just one person – would it be worth the fear? Would it be worth courageously doing the thing you want to do?

 

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.

  ~Ambrose Redmoon

No one can do the dance quite like Matt. No one can do your “dance” quite like you.

 

 Let’s dance……