We Just Need To Make It To the 101st Blow

By Suchitra Sairam

One of my nightmares as a dance teacher… when a student is on the cusp of crying in class.

It’s infrequent, and most often with younger students. 99% of the time, they are learning something challenging, and it’s not working just yet.

Frustration mounts. Doubts encroach. Tears begin to well.

My #1 goal at that point? Keep the tears at bay, so I can give the pep talk.

I remind them dance
🤗 is fun
😓 is hard
🕛 takes time
👏🏽 takes courage
🥰 creates beauty

I ask them to share something in dance that used to be hard, but is easier now. And then I break out the stonecutter story from Danish social reformer Jacob Riis.

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

Practice seems futile when we still don’t “get it.”

Movements seem impossible when we first learn them.

Significant progress at the beginning misleads us as we work longer term.

Day by day, we may not see results. We don’t realize every time we show up, the incremental improvements add up.

Every day we show up, we’re working toward that 101st blow.