YOLO in the New Year
BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT; ILLUSTRATION BY TRACEY TURNER
I have an admission to make: I love the slogan YOLO. I don’t care if it sprung out of a rap song and became a kitschy mantra for millennials; I adopt it whole-heartedly.
For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, YOLO means You Only Live Once. For me, it’s a little Carl Sagan-esque reminder that we are specks on an orbiting dust mite, and that this thing called life is a capricious accident. Perhaps the more religious of you might argue that there is an afterlife, a greater being or an embodied spirit. But based on the evidence, all I know for sure is that this life is it, and it goes by quickly.
Over the past year and a half I have had the great pleasure of working on a project interviewing and photographing dancers over age 50. As part of each interview, I ask what success and legacy mean, and what advice each interviewee would give to a younger generation. No one says: “Gosh, I’m glad I put off dancing in my living room or having dinner with friends so I could work.”
No, they almost always say the opposite.
I often hear the refrain: “I’m too busy.” It is used with a myriad of intentions, but always with a degree of self-importance. Yes, I am fully aware that there are many demands in modern life. But to what extent do we buy into this paradigm? To what extent are we too busy for the things that really matter? To what extent are we too busy to YOLO?
I’m serious.
I am going to make a New Year’s resolution, and I hope that you will join me: I am removing the word “busy” from my vocabulary. I will definitely find myself buried in work again (it can’t be helped), but I will find a synonym for “busy” that doesn’t boast my myopic self-importance.
This world is not always a good place. People have done and will continue to do horrible things. We can be incredibly corrupt beings. Which, to my mind, makes it all the more important to YOLO.
Spend time with people you care about. Lots and lots of time. Pursue something you love, even if it doesn’t make any sense or cents. Throw yourself at your passions with abandon. Question your assumptions. Learn new things. Jump off the metaphorical cliff. Climb the mountain just to see what’s on the other side. Be independent. Be dependent. Find simplicity. Invite complication. Consider the idea that love and passion are not monochromatic, that they involve pain and suffering. Rejoice in the shadows as well as the light. Know that death, disease, heartbreak and misunderstandings will bring enough sorrow on us that we don’t need to invite more by running in circles after an idea of success that is commandeered by a system that revolves around productivity. Most of all, don’t be too busy.
I like to think of these older dancers as YOLO models. They are not all conventionally successful, but they have thrown themselves at dance again and again because they know that it is something worth pursuing. In the greater scope of things, we barely exist for a moment. Seize and embrace that moment. But don’t be “busy”; be involved and immersed.
The painter Ran Ortner so poignantly said, “We already know we’re going to break down and crash. There’s something liberating about that. This is our moment in the sun. Let’s dance.” He might as well have just said, “YOLO.”
