That’s what she expressed enthusiastically, sharing high fives with both hands as the milonga set ended….me reciprocating with “Yes….we win!”  The exuberance of our dance carrying our spirits upward into the air as we savoured those moments. But what means that expression: “We win!”  I’m laughing as I ask myself this question because it’s impossible to explain in words.  Of course, I’ll try. For me it means we danced our best dance possible at this time, technically precise and artistically connected to the music and one another’s dance. It means we shared a dance epiphany of sorts, we found newness in well known movement patterns, while also somehow expanding our own dance vocabulary. It means this entire milonga—-this four hour period of time devoted to dancing tango, was worth every moment, because every moment was captured in that one set we just completed, a culmination of sorts, of many years of classes and practicas.  I remember that when I was first learning tango, I heard stories of older masters, men usually, who’d go to the milonga and dance only one, two or maybe three times the whole evening which extended for four or five hours or longer.  Now, many years later, I finally get it. When we are first learning we want to dance every dance….even feeling if we don’t we have missed an opportunity or have even failed somehow.  But when we finally arrive to a level of (perhaps not of mastery-that’s too arrogant) but efficiency or confidence perhaps, dancing every set is no longer the point. What is?  I think now -after 12 years of classes and five trips to BsAs, for me the point is to dance my own dance with honesty, integrity and above all: gratitude and joy!