Jellyfish know how to dance like no one is watching.
Last week, Scott and I took a little trip to the Waikiki Aquarium. We love aquariums. We’ve been to the ones in Monterey, Barcelona, Baltimore, and now Waikiki together and we always discover something new and wonderful at an aquarium.
While wandering through the wonderful exhibits in the Waikiki Aquarium, we came across a small tank in a dark corner, lit by a single overhead light and a black light inside, largely ignored by the crowds who were trying to press around the turtle tank or the reef tanks. In that tank, we saw a dozen small jellyfish under the black light.
But those suckers were swimming for all they were worth, spinning up and down through the tank, spiraling together in their own private dances and spinning away again, in search of their own adventures.
Maybe they were dancing because no one but us was watching them, but how much does a jellyfish really care about an audience? There’s something absolutely wonderful in pure beauty that exists not for an audience, not for a show, but simply for its own sake. In a dance that takes place not for an audience, but for the pure joy of the dance.