Day 7 - Jazz

5 minutes of dancing to excellent R&B, courtesy of Pandora radio led to several more minutes of jogging in place and jumping jacks. Of all the ways I know of to jumpstart exercise, dancing to your favorite music is the best. Not only is dancing pleasurable and simple (especially in your own living room with curtains drawn, or not, clothing optional), you instinctively use a cross-pattern with your arms and legs: when the left arm goes out, the right leg goes out in the opposite direction, and vice versa. This pattern is inherent in many of the things we bipedal humans do - walking and running, and dancing. To quote Andrew Weil "this type of movement generates electrical activity in the brain that has a harmonizing influence on the whole central nervous system."

What am I grateful for today? Jazz. R&B. That great intersection of rhythms and harmonies and instrumentation that produces a swinging of the hips, a snap in the fingers and a tap in the foot. I actually don't know very much about the genre, only having dabbled in listening to a few fundamental building blocks like Ella and Miles Davis. But what I know is that listening to jazz artists, there is a terrific energy and tempo that matches modern life. Jazz doesn't give you the gigantic swelling forces of nature that classical symphonies do, and obviously, the instrumentation gives you a completely different frame of reference, but classical never gives you such sultry, taffy-like bon-bons the way the jazz repertoire does.

And only jazz completes a dark nightclub with glasses of golden colored liquid and coolly dressed people with a warm, smooth, and relaxed atmosphere. Yummy.