Time Enough to Dance

 
From about the time she could walk until she was over 3 years old, my daughter, Serene, would come into my office and grab a finger on my left hand and tug on me.
 
"Let's dance!" she would say. Usually this was because of some music on TV or in a video she was watching. So I had to move fast, or we would miss the music.
 
We would rush out the door of the office to stand in front of the TV and we would "dance". "Dancing" mostly consisted of holding hands and jumping up and down, or spinning in circles. We would "dance" our little dance, and then I would go back to work and she would go back to what she was doing, both of us smiling, sometimes laughing.
 
These dance requests didn't always come at the most opportune of times. Most often, they couldn't have come at  worse times.
 
And when I'm concentrating, I'm not someone who likes being distracted. I can get downright cranky about it.
 
Sometimes I would be handling email, which is usually customer support and I welcomed the distraction. More often, though, I would be "juggling" code changes across an entire source base, or staring at that same source code trying to puzzle out what the hell was going wrong, or concentrating and type-type-typing on a writing project.
 
We didn't dance every time she came in and asked me to. But we danced a lot. Because I knew there would come a day when she no longer wanted to dance with me. And I had better get in all the dancing I could while the getting was good.
 
I learned I could deal with the distractions (good and bad) of my family without totally ignoring them (my family, I mean). I learned I could disengage from my current task long enough to dance with my daughter and get right back to work. And I usually felt much better after than before.
 
I learned that there is always time enough to dance.
 
-David
 
PS I originally posted this on my Joe Indie blog in 2007. With Quaid now six months old and becoming much more mobile and interactive, it seemed appropriate again.
 
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