the dance

It's almost never worth worrying about whether an individual action is the right thing to do. It's like trying to dance while worrying at every moment whether you're making the right move. Just do the dance. It doesn't matter if you get a few moves wrong if you have the right spirit.

You'd rather listen to a concert by someone possessed with a deep sense of the music, its internal voices and their interaction, and a contagious enthusiasm for the dance, than one by someone who got each note technically perfect.

Put differently: rule utilitarianism $\gg$ act utilitarianism.

I thought about this at the grocery store: I was stressed about buying ingredients for a salad I might want to try to make. Safeway didn't have all the types of lettuce, I could go to another store too but that'd take extra time and be a pain and they still might not have it. In the end I decided to just buy what I could get at Safeway and make a slightly imperfect salad. This could matter a lot: making this salad imperfectly could mean I don't fall in love with it, so I write it off unjustifiably. But I'd rather live in world where I do things without fear of getting them wrong. And importantly, iterate and practice. If this salad is decent, I'll make it again, and make it better next time.

I played violin this afternoon for the first time in months. I'm not great, and very rusty, but I'm still damn good and it felt good. It reminded me that part of getting better is playing, where I just go for it and try to do my best, and part is practicing, where I isolate difficult parts and put concentrated attention into getting better at them. The practicing is not the dance, but the more you practice, the easier things come during the dance itself.