Hugs

When I first read that, I was astounded. In all honesty, I might get 12 real hugs (i.e. 3 seconds or longer) a year. I can’t remember the last time I had a 20 second hug. Being single and living on my own, there are many days that I see very few people. When I do see my friends, I’m normally not much of a hugger. Around my birthday I was feeling a bit sad about not having someone to cuddle with in my bed, so I bought a Yoda pillow pal to hug at night. This is the state of my hugging life…

This lack of hugging in my life got me to thinking about some of the reasons why I’ve been enjoying tango so much since I started learning it a few weeks ago. I think that one of the reasons is that every lesson and every dance forces me out of my comfort zone in regards to physical contact and forces me to embrace my partner. Sometimes this is in open embrace and sometimes close, but regardless of the type of embrace I share a goodly bit of my body with dance partner for 3 minutes at a time. During the classes and milongas I dance with many different partners, which offers many opportunities to reach my hug quota for the day.

While the idea that I receive so few hugs is a bit sad (and something I will begin to change), I like the idea that I found a way to partially fulfill my need for human touch. Some problems have more than one right answer, and I think dancing is one of my answers for this. So that’s a pretty cool idea.

I’m already planning a blogging project around the idea of 12 hugs a day, so if you see me in the near future I may ask if I can have a hug. I hope you’ll say yes, because you might need one too.

Namaste.