Pointe Shoes, Advanced Math, and Liberatory Scale

I started dancing en pointe a little prematurely. I wasn’t exactly ready for it, but just feeling my feet in the shoes made me want to work up to doing it well. The taste of being en pointe was the driver for the struggle to get there. I do the same thing with learning math. I open up multivariable calculus books and watch topology courses on YouTube, even though I haven’t met the prerequisites. I read through Navier-Stokes equations without any prior exposure to the variables. The high of imagining the realization of the understanding, or of the dancing, flows back to the starting point. It becomes the motivator for everything leading up to it, and it gives the path to it meaning. The end is the beginning.

This idea of reversing the pre-requisites - starting at the advanced level and working my ay back, has been so inspiring to my learning process. And it makes me wonder what it means for collective liberation: what does it mean to start at the end? I’m inspired and motivated by bringing about a world that is rich with emotion and character, void of transactions and bureaucracy, and filled with the unexpected effervescence of authentic creativity. Imagining a world on the other side of this monetary and coercive paradigm is a high in itself. It’s topology, it’s dancing en pointe, it’s something to reach for. Holding this imagination should inform and motivate our relationships on the small scale, but with a twist. Our imaginations are cultivated on the small scale by way of the emotions that we feel in our most intimate and inspiring friendships. There’s a feedback loop between the micro and macro emotional imagination. As we prefigure the world we want to see, we also level up our imaginations for what it could be. With that in mind, we can allow ourselves to wildly ideate about a liberated world while living it into existence on the smallest of scales. Liberation happens with trust, integrity, and inspiration. Liberation IS trust, integrity, and inspiration. The care we want to feel takes time and…care. By embodying and prefiguring the emotional paradigm we want to feel, we can point to it, discuss it, and grow it, as we are feeling it. And that’s the pre-requisite to the big dream. It also IS the big dream, here and now. The big liberation dream is the motivator and also the substance of our pleasurable struggle to embody it.