Dancing Lessons

There is an athletic team you may not have heard of. They are not affiliated with any city, league or country. They are what you might call freelance. They call themselves Team Hoyt, composed of father and son Dick and Rick Hoyt. You may want to watch a video about them before you read on: see it here.

If all you want is a feel-good story about these two memorable men, then you can find it easily almost anywhere you look. But this account takes a different, albeit speculative, approach. One involving multi-incarnational conspiracies and a kind of love and commitment that is foreign to all but a select few human beings, but should be ordinary to us all.

In science there is a dictum: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” What that means to me is that the degree of eccentricity of one thing must be matched by the eccentricity of anything closely bound to it. Eccentricity means “away from the center,” even “abnormal” if you prefer. And by “bound to,” I mean intimately connect to or with. This is how I apply it here.

It is inconceivable to me that Dick and Rick just “happened” to wind up father and son, that Rick just happened to be born with his umbilicus wrapped around his neck, that the consequence of that was a life-long marriage to cerebral palsy. And forget about the odds in a random Universe of father and son becoming a highly successful athletic team in some of humanities most grueling tests of dogged determination and courage. In a truly random Universe, the odds of such a combination of events is about as likely as there being no other life out there beyond the atmosphere of Earth. Ya, right.

So what other explanation is available? I like this one. It may be entirely true, partially true, or totally untrue. But it does at least serve to illustrate the possibilities that are always present in each of our lives, but cast in so much more dramatic relief in cases like Team Hoyt. It is one of their gifts to us all.

In order for what I’m about to say to make sense, you must realize that I consider all time as occurring simultaneously. So the idea of past and future incarnations is nonsensical. They are all happening at once. We just ignore everything except what we are presently focused on. Set that down.

What if the lives presently being lived by Dick and Rick are not the only ones they share? What if they have other incarnations, perhaps in years that precede or follow today? What if they have many other relationships in those lives together? And what if they really love living out their fondest ambitions together? What if this shared incarnation one in which they conspired together to bring the learning, the power, the ambitions of many other lives to a fine point for the benefit of thousands, maybe millions, of other people? And what if they set the whole thing up for those and other more personal reasons? Wouldn’t that cast their drama in a far different and even more miraculous light? You bet it would. And that’s what I want to explore here.

As I watched a short video about Team Hoyt (you can see it here, too), I was moved by the love, the power, and the human drama it exposed. But I was also aware of the multidimensional backstory that had to accompany it. What the story was I didn’t, still don’t, and probably never will know for certain. But the fact that it exists and is a work of high art by any sane standard is to me incontrovertible. The rest is details.

As I watch these two men train, compete, learn and love together, I am overwhelmed with a sense of awe for the fantastic coordination, creativity, the astonishingly love and desire needed to pull it off. Yet there is living proof of it all.

While this is certainly a human drama, it’s domain clearly is not bound to anything earthly. Its power spins off into other dimensions of which we have little or no knowledge. It has to, for that is where it is rooted. It is a dance across the stars, in a way, a transcendental tango, if you will.

You might want to watch the video again here, and see it with some of these perspectives in mind. It may be even better than before.

And the dancers…are they not virtuosos? Do they not dance as one in ways that have never been attempted before? And does not the whole world stand up and take note? Yes indeed. And we thank you both, Dick and Rick, for sharing with us all your most unique and powerfully dramatic dance across the very face of time. It may not be The Greatest Show On Earth, but it will do till the real thing comes along.

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