The place: Prior Street near Chinatown. You probably would not go into the parking lot of this warehouse looking place unless you were looking to buy fresh produce wholesale. Inside the building, navigate through some stairs and a hallway, you will find yourself in a quaint but decent sized dance hall. Ahh yes, I have heard about this place before.

The teacher: an older couple. The gentleman is engineer by day. The story is that the wife was a Standard champion and the husband was a Latin champion. I suppose that they compromised by learning each other’s dance.

While watching the lesson, I found myself delving into my own reasons and rational for getting into dancing in the first place. Was it to pick up women? Was it for fun? Was it for exercise?

Then, I went on into more basic questions: What is the meaning of life? I mean, in the end, we’re all just going to be stardust anyways, right? Why dance?

Then it hit me: humans form a network of nodes that serve as a knowledge database system. There is absolutely no way for dancing to be passed from one generation to another generation by using books and written descriptions. It must be passed on by live dancing databases. Even if I am not out to become a dance teacher, we are all part of the ecosystem of passing on the dance knowledge. We are redundant copies of the information to pass on to future generations.

This naturally extends to many other fields of knowledge: academia, art, music, politics. Even for subjects that can be perfectly transferred and recorded using books, you still need another human to point out that such a book exist and is available.

So, enjoy your dancing, your reading, your music, your hobbies and skills. Consider yourself to be doing the good deed of remembering what needs to be remembered for future knowledge seekers.

For my dancing friends that read this blog, you may (or may not) have noticed my reduction in my dancing activity. I mean – there was a time when I was doing ballroom and/or going to salsa classes multiple times a week. Honestly, I was in a bit of a burnout of going so hard, nowhere fast.

In a way, it was starting to have a similar feel to my startup-attempts a while ago: a lot of grind and energy spent without much results or much to show for. I was starting to feel like a robot shuffling from class to class and not having as much fun as when I started.

I still enjoy the friendships that I have made throughout my dancing activities. And most absolutely, I will go out for the occasional social outing. I mean, aren’t you dying to go dancing at Robson Square this summer? However, I won’t be pushing myself just for the sake of pushing myself. I am just going to keep it fun for myself.

I mean, there are so many other things to try and do right?

These days, my third place is the salsa classes I’m taking. I’ve started taking classes in March – I like the pace and intensity and it is at just the right level of difficulty for me. I only wish my ballroom dancing friends would join me, haha! Did I mention that the classes are starting up again in January? Did I mention that the teacher lets you go more than once a week to his other locations, if you sign up for “one” class? Did I mention that there are more girls than guys? Did I mention that we learned an awesome move that made it look like the guy was tossing the girl in a dramatic looking fashion? How’s my sales pitch?

Dance halls and studios have not always been my third place of choice.

In the past, I’ve gone to church. I’ve gone to Toastmasters. Heck, you might even consider the library as a serious third place in my youth. The Web, could be considered a virtual third place. When I was still in university, school was both the work place and the third place

Where is your third place?