Make a list of things you want to do, for any reason, and then do them one by one. You can schedule them, or do them all today, if you have the time.

By doing them to merely mark them down as done, you are wasting your life.

Passion is the reason to be alive.

How do you put into words an experience that is mainly physical and emotional?

Imagine that one day you feel completely aware. Suddenly you feel that you are awake, that until now you were in a semi-sleeping state.

Now you will always want to be awake and aware.

That is dancing.

It is to make of your desire of returning to that sensation of being awake and aware the source and the guide of all other elements composing your life.

If you are painting a picture, a landscape for instance, you activate a process in which the end result will be the landscape.

When you dance, the process and the end result are one and the same.

There is practice, training, learning, and these instances of the elaboration of your dance are the ones in which the errors, mistakes and accidents are part of the process, which is to develop the set of skills and the level of sensitivity that allows you to become a good dancer, a process that for a good dancer never ends.

Often we have loopholes in our personality, some situations trigger a sharp disconnect with reality, breaking our interaction with others, turning us inwards, preventing us from seeing aspects of our character that contradict our ideal, impeding our improvement. We waste an enormous amount of energy on those situations. Emotions overflow in us out of our control.

Put yourself in a position where you have no choice but to accept, to say “yes” to the physical realities of your body and the physical world, to accept that time flows forward, without any chance of returning, to recognize that your company (your partner) and the others (the other couples on the dance floor and in the milonga) have their own desires and limitations, even if they are not aware of them, to acknowledge your own desires and limitations, and say “yes” to all with joy.

You’ll be dancing Tango.

A choreography.

When you see dancing, you can objectively describe the movements that you see and note the coincidence of those movements with sounds in the music. A description like this, accurate and precise, cannot replace the experience of witnessing the phenomena of the dance. Your words may be very effective in producing emotions in your audience, but you will be performing poetry, not dancing.

Explaining how to dance Tango requires multiple skills, starting with the fundamental skill of dancing Tango.

The task of teaching the art of Tango dancing is complex, because its subject does not admit simplifications. To know how to dance Tango requires the same process as knowing a human being, not any human being but a particular person. You do not get to know a person in your first encounter, neither in the second, you get to know more about this particular human being every time you meet. This human being, as with all human beings, have many layers in its personality. You find the layers of this persona in public, and other layers when meeting one on one. As you get to know this person more and more, you develop bonds with this person.

This particular person is not a particle floating in the vacuum. This person belongs to a world. You get to know this world by getting to know more and more about this person. In some moment, to really know this person, you need to go and see this person’s world, and see this person in his/her world. You go and meet his/her family, friends, and if this person comes from another country and culture, you will travel there.

Tango, as a dance, is not an abstraction. It empirically manifests to you in the dancing of your teachers, in their personas. To dance Tango, inevitably, you will get to know these persons face to face, in a group and in private lessons. They will be your first experience of dancing Tango from which all subsequent experiences will be molded. Buenos Aires is the world to which Tango belongs, as well as the concrete particular personas of your Tango teachers. To really know Tango, you need to see them in Buenos Aires, at the milongas, with their peers, and experience it yourself, not once, but regularly.

Tango is Life.

It is the way you connect to yourself, to your partner, to the music and to the dance floor.

Experienced milongueros pay meticulous attention to their walk, and keep working to improve it even after decades of dancing.

Practice walking by yourself and with a partner. Listen to tango music from the Golden Era every day, not as a “to do” task, but because you are passionate about it. Go to milongas.

Go to Buenos Aires.

We dance because we value a fulfilling life. We remain committed to our body, recognizing it as the source of our existence. We receive it without having asked for it. That means, for me, that we were challenged to live.

What would be the price of such a life?

A life built step by step as an interpretation of the music of your everyday reality. A life that does not reject anything that happens, incorporating every action in the chain of your own history, saying:

“It was necessary that it happen, it had to happen, I wanted it to happen”.