Camille Saint-Saëns was probably at work on Danse Macabre in 1874. His work was first performed in 1875. The composer based his work on a myth that dates to the late Middle Ages and probably earlier times.  In its traditional form, the myth has Death, that hooded dark figure, calling the deceased out of their graves to dance from midnight till dawn on Halloween. In the French form of the story, Death plays a violin.
 
I wonder whether or not Camille was aware of what was going on in France at the time of his composing. That is, I wonder whether or not he knew what was keeping Death so busy recruiting new dancers.
 
We know. According to the statistics gathered at the time, suicide was the cause. Death didn’t have much work to do. People actively did his work for him. Of course, they all had reasons. The French government listed those reasons: Reverses in fortune, family troubles, drunkenness, love and debauchery, avoidance of physical suffering and penalties of capital crimes, mental disease of some kind, and “unclassified troubles.”**
 
“Unclassified troubles”? The key word is troubles. So, we can list motives like reverses in fortune and avoidance of physical suffering, but there is somehow out there among our fellow humans something else driving them toward a danse macabre, and we just can’t figure out what that might be.
 
For 1874, government officials in France counted 5,617 suicides. So many intentional new graveyard dancers! And now in the twenty-first century proportionately more people in France feel compelled to follow Death’s choreography: “Every year around 220,000 people in France attempt to take their own life and 10,000 of those die as a result.”***
 
Every one of us is a dancer with troubles. That’s the nature of Life’s choreography. The troubles interrupt free-flowing movement with stumbling, but the stumbling is, itself, a kind of dance. In the Dance of Life, we sometimes move gracefully and freely and at other times haltingly and awkwardly. Life’s dance is always different, sometimes easy; sometimes, difficult. It is an unexpected choreography that we make up as we perform. Our motives for dancing include both joy and sorrow, and, yes, sometimes we dance for “unclassified” reasons, maybe even for vague, only partially identifiable “troubles.” But, unlike those who follow Death through a cemetery in a danse macabre, the living continue to dance when the motives change. Troubles come and go. Even unclassified reasons come and go.
 
I don’t know about you. I’m a terrible dancer, but I like dancing. Life’s dance has movements that intrigue me, even when I fail to follow the choreographic instructions. But there’s joy in dancing awkwardly, also. Watch toddlers dance. Unaffected by “unclassified troubles,” toddlers dance a freestyle jig. And maybe since each of us learns the choreography of life’s vicissitudes by aging, each is, in a sense, a toddler dancing.
 
I prefer dancing awkwardly in life to dancing to a tune that has, like Danse Macabre, a definitive end and a predictable return to motionlessness.
 
Apparently, we get to choose our choreographers. We can choose ourselves and choreograph as we go, or we can choose that dark figure who leads the danse macabre.
 
You know what? I like your dance even when you stumble, and I hope you do, too.
 
*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyknBTm_YyM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre#/media/File:Thetriumphofdeath.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre#/media/File:Danse_Macabre_-_Guyot_Marchand9_(Abbot_and_Bailiff).jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre#/media/File:Trionfo_della_morte_-_Chiesa_S._Maria_Annunciata_-_Bienno_(ph_Luca_Giarelli).jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre#/media/File:Holbein_Danse_Macabre_15.jpg
 
**
Scientific American, Vol. XXXVI, No. 8, New York, Saturday, February 24, 1877.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19406/19406-h/19406-h.htm#art62
 
***
https://www.thelocal.fr/20130910/why-france-has-such-a-high-suicide-rate

Starlings appear to love power lines. Perching on them gives migrating flocks a resting place, and they appear to gather there during their migratory journeys. Introduced in the nineteenth century into North America by Eugene Schieffelin, a member of the American Acclimatization Society, the European Starling has proliferated enough to become a widespread species on the continent. Arriving about the time Americans were powering up with electricity, the birds adapted not only to ecological niches but also to the wires strung across the streets of the country. Their adaptation to many features of their new environment is a reason for their success. Some estimate that from the approximate 100 original birds Schieffelin introduced, Starling bird population now exceeds 100 million individuals. Good thing we put up all those wires.
 
Of course, Starlings can perch on wires because they have feet that can grab. Native to trees, the birds can latch onto branches, and wires are substitute branches. Starlings adapted, saw an unoccupied place, and moved in.
 
Not so with ducks. Ducks inhabited North America long before people and certainly before electrical wires and the invasive introduction of Starlings. In their long migratory history generations of ducks have seen wires stretch throughout the continent. But they can’t perch on wires. Blame webbed feet and preferred habitat.
 
Ducks might lack the ability to grasp a wire, but they do very well in their long-standing habitats of land and water, places to which they adapted long ago. Wires and branches are the boundary that ducks cannot cross. And Starlings, for all their abilities to adapt to a new continent and artificial branches, will never become good swimmers. Any limitation humbles us. For ducks and Starlings those limitations come in the form of wires and water.
 
Within their limitations and like ducks, some people do very well in environments they have long inhabited. Also within their limitations and like Starlings, some people do very well by adapting to new environments.
 
Are you more like a duck or more like a Starling?

Finding the centers of our lives is an ongoing process. We all change, and any specific point might, like Vega and Polaris vying for claim as “North Pole Star” over thousands of years, move off center for some time before returning to its former position. Our centers vary in kind, also. We have centers of place, of attitude, and of thought, the last including both our personal theologies and philosophies.
 
Centers change because we don’t live symmetrical lives. There are just too many unpredictable influences impinging on our daily existence that prevent a simple balloon-like expansion from our earlier selves. Successes and failures, celebrations and tragedies, and gained and lost skills all contribute to shifts in whatever centers our lives. We also accidentally or purposefully discover information that changes our knowledge of what was once central to our being.
 
See whether or not we can make this more specific. In the first half of the nineteenth century, as astronomers were making measurements of the celestial objects, one Dr. Maedler, the Director of the Dorpat Observatory in Russia, claimed that the “center” of the universe around which the heavens revolved was the star cluster Pleiades and its central star Alcyene (now Alcyone). We can’t fault Maedler for either suggesting that the star cluster was stationary or measuring its distance inaccurately (537 LY v. the current 440 LY). Scientific astronomy as we know it has progressed through both theory and instruments. We know the Pleiades to be young stars and masses of gas, and we know Alcyone to be a very bright, blue giant sun about ten times the size of good old Sol and more than 2,000 times brighter. It also has companions not visible without high magnification. One can see some sense in Maedler’s mistake in choosing Alcyene as a center. It was bright and central to the “Seven Sisters” of the Pleiades, but he studied the heavens long before Edwin Hubble discovered the nature of galaxies and our place in the Milky Way.
 
We all identify centers around which we revolve. In some instances, we claim a surety that reveals our incomplete knowledge. New knowledge shakes the surety and alters the center. In other instances, we claim a surety that we refuse to reexamine in the face of discovery.
 
Some of us—maybe all of us—perceive any movement away from a well-established center to be a threat to our personal identity. Some of us—probably not all of us—welcome shifts because we acknowledge them as refinements of personal and universal “truths.” Dr. Maedler would probably be astonished at the information we now have about the heavens and the nature of an acentric universe filled with binary and ternary star systems. He might react the way people reacted to the overturning of the heliocentric universe of Ptolemy by Copernicus, Galileo, and Bruno hundreds of years ago. Or he might take an enlightened view that welcomes discovery.
 
Although we sometimes balk at change, with open minds we come to recognize much of our knowledge is incomplete and that the “centers” of our personal universes are subject to change. But changing centers do not need to threaten our sense of security. As the COBE and WMAP satellites confirm and Inflation Theory describes, the universe began as a singularity some 13.8 billion years ago. It began as a point smaller than what we can imagine and expanded in the so-called Big Bang. At the beginning, all the universe was in the “center.” You were in the center. You are, in fact, the center of the universe—as I am and as is everyone.
 
Take some consolation that there is that unchanging fact: You are your own center. The only way for it to shift, to change, is for you to discover something about yourself you never knew. That can only happen if you find new means to take the measure of yourself and those other “centers” you have chosen and then altered. Just remember Dr. Maedler’s choice of bright Alcyone as an immovable center: The brightest object on which you rest your attention and center your life might not be what you believe it is. 

Sitting at a resort pool, one has difficulty not listening to close-by conversations of strangers. Headphones are the only privacy resort at a resort.
 
But if one has no headphones at the moment, then listening reveals something about our species. With beer or tropical drink in hand and submerged to our waists, we talk incessantly under bright sunshine: Complete strangers who will never meet beyond the manicured grounds of relaxation chatting about...
 
Personal stories first. The “here’s all I want you to know about me” reflect off warming drinks and sunning torsos.
 
Then stories of place both near and far. The “here’s what I think about the resort, the food, and, oh! By the way, here’s a little something about where I live and the place where I work” filling the ears of people on nearby chaise lounges.
 
Finally, philosophizing. The “they ought and they should do something about…” coupled with general analyses of current social events drag the conversation into the abyss of ineffective chatter filled with Either/Or logic.
 
It’s as though we hear each other say, “Today, I have nothing specific to offer save what portrays my self image, my experience with place, and my general attitude about life in the world I left before I came to this resort.”
 
Listen. If you suspect futility is at work, it is. I’m not advocating unfriendly silence; I’m simply pointing out that on most days we have nothing specific to offer, nothing that generates any new ideas. In spite of that, we talk.
 
But having no ideas to advance the human condition is not what we need to do at a resort—nor in most other circumstances. The chatter, however meaningless and temporary, binds us. That ability to connect with a complete stranger for a brief time epitomizes our gregarious nature.
 
We don’t have to carry away from such conversations some deep meaning or new knowledge. Initiated by a chance gathering in a pool, easily struck conversations among people from different places reveal our commonality, and chatting strikes a similar note of belonging in the ears of those lying on nearby chaise lounges without isolating headphones.
 
Don’t have anything specific to say? Talk anyway.