You Were Wild Once
A friend of mine has a bumper sticker on her car that says “You were wild once…Don’t let them tame you.” I’ve always liked that quote and wanted to find out more about who said it and what the context of it was, so I did a little bit of google-powered investigating and discovered something that amazed and inspired me.
This quote was said by famous dancer, Isadora Duncan, who invented the technique and art form that later became known as Modern Dance. Before Isadora Duncan, dance was rigid, stiff, and not considered a purely artistic expression. After Isadora Duncan, everything changed.
When I think of dance today, I think of so many different kinds from so many different places in the world. I also think of artistic expression where the human body is both canvas and medium. I cannot imagine a world where all dance was restricted to predetermined movements.
To me, Isadora Duncan is an example of the kind of impact a single person can have not only on those who work with her daily but also on the entire world. Our worldwide culture is forever changed because of Isadora Duncan’s dance philosophy. We will never be the same again, and it’s because she infected the world with her ideas.
And then I come back to this quote, “You were wild once….Don’t let them tame you.” We are wild when we are children. We run across the grass, play in the mud, tear holes in our clothes, forget to put our shoes on before we go outside. We don’t think in terms of what the right answer must look like or that a certain answer has to be wrong. The world is what the world is and everything is possible. As we grow into adults, we are trained to believe that the world functions in a specific way, that certain answers can only be right if they look a certain way, and that some answers will always be wrong no matter what they look like. We stop running through the grass and playing in the mud. We never forget our shoes before we go outside, and if we ever tear holes in our clothes it suddenly seems like the world will end. In short, we let “them” tame us.
And why should we? What if we didn’t wear the same pair of shoes two days in a row? What if we let the right answer be the right answer no matter what it looked like? What if, when we find a wrong answer, we don’t just let it die, but instead we find the question that makes it a right answer?
Of course, there is nothing wrong with wearing shoes outside or looking for right answers or knowing when an answer is not the one you’re looking for, but there’s no reason we can’t still be wild about it.
