The Dance

I’ve awakened inside a postcard. Outside my window at Hotel Seeburg, Lake Lucerne spreads like molten silver beneath peaks that dwarf anything I’ve painted in Colorado or the Adirondacks. These are the Swiss Alps in their full glory — cathedrals of stone and snow that make you believe in something larger than yourself.

The sun creeps behind the Pilatus massif, setting the mountain face ablaze with copper and gold. Light dances across the lake in brushstrokes I could spend a lifetime trying to capture. My easel calls from the corner, but breakfast waits, and soon we’ll board the coach to Engelberg, where my painting adventure begins in earnest.

This is day two of leading artists through Switzerland — some old friends, others destined to become so. Last night’s welcome dinner was brief; jet lag is the great equalizer. But today, ah today, we paint our first alpine village. I’m seriously considering those lederhosen hanging in the closet. In Switzerland, audacity feels not just acceptable, but required.

The Girl in the Clock Shop

Decades ago, I stood in this same magical landscape as a 19-year-old boy, trembling not from the mountain air but from my own inadequacies. My parents had gifted me a week in Switzerland — a gesture of love that would change the trajectory of my life, though not in the way any of us expected.

We wandered Lucerne’s cobblestone arteries until we found ourselves in a wonderland of a clock shop. Hundreds of cuckoo birds emerged on the hour from a variety of wooden chalets. Music boxes tinkled Swiss melodies. The air itself seemed to tick with possibility. I purchased a small golden cage housing two mechanical songbirds — wind them up and they would perform a duet that sounded like joy itself.

That cage sits on my shelf today. The birds no longer sing.

Behind the counter stood a young woman my age, dressed in traditional dirndl, her blond hair braided with ribbons that caught the afternoon light streaming through the shop windows. She could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, and in many ways, she had.

“Would you like to go dancing with me tonight?” she asked in accented English, her blue eyes holding mine with a directness that made my knees weak.

Time stopped. The clocks continued their chorus, but everything else was suspended in amber. This beautiful creature — this Swiss goddess — was asking me to dance?

“Me?” I stammered, glancing around as though she might be addressing some more worthy candidate hiding behind a grandfather clock. “You’re asking me to go dancing?”

“Ja,” she said simply, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

I was 19, single, and had been dreaming of adventure since the plane lifted off American soil. Yet when adventure itself stood before me in a blue dirndl, offering her hand, I panicked.

“Oh, um, well, I’m … uh … with my parents and we have plans tonight.” The words tumbled out like stones down a mountainside, each one taking me further from possibility.

Her face fell — just a micro-expression, but I caught it. Disappointment flickered across her features before she recovered with European politeness.

When I confessed my failure to my parents over dinner, they looked at me as if I’d just announced I was giving up breathing.

“That’s perfectly fine,” my mother said. “You should go.”

“Absolutely!” my father agreed. “What an opportunity!”

They meant it. They would have gladly eaten room service while their son lived the kind of story people tell their grandchildren. But the damage was done, and my shyness had already stolen the moment. Even when they encouraged me to return to the shop the next day, to ask her out properly, I couldn’t summon the courage.

I’ve wondered a thousand times since: Would I now be speaking German to my Swiss children while a St. Bernard with a rescue barrel guards our chalet door? It’s a beautiful fiction, but fiction nonetheless. I’m grateful for the life I built, yet the question lingers to this day.

The Architecture of Fear

Shyness is fear wearing a Sunday suit. It masquerades as humility while it pickpockets our dreams. At 19, I had the confidence of a tourist with a phrasebook, fumbling through life’s most important conversations in a language I’d never learned to speak: self-worth.

The paradox still amazes me. Today, I can stride onto a stage before 2,000 artists at the Plein Air Convention, hang upside down from a trapeze, dress as a Renaissance painter complete with flowing cape and feathered hat, and feel absolutely at home. Yet put me in certain social situations, with certain types of people, and that 19-year-old boy resurfaces, still stammering, still backing away from the dance.

The Ten-Minute Miracle

Years later, at a Tony Robbins event — one of those massive gatherings where possibility hangs in the air like morning mist — I found myself confessing my limitation to a friend named Patrick. The venue thrummed with energy, thousands of people breaking through barriers they didn’t even know they had.

“There’s someone here who can help,” Patrick said, and within minutes I found myself in a quiet corner with a woman whose name I’ve forgotten but whose gift I’ll never lose.

“When do you feel most confident?” she asked.

“On stage,” I answered without hesitation. “When I’m teaching, performing, making people laugh.”

“And these people who intimidate you — how many have commanded a stage in front of thousands?”

“None,” I realized.

“Exactly. You possess something they don’t. You have the courage to be vulnerable in front of multitudes, to risk failure publicly, to stand in the light while others remain safely in the shadows.”

She taught me a simple anchor — squeeze my hands together while visualizing that stage, the crowd, the standing ovation. “When confidence deserts you,” she said, “return to that moment. Remember who you really are.”

It sounded like parlor tricks wrapped in psychology. I was skeptical until weeks later, entering a boardroom full of billionaires who looked at me like I was the help, I closed my eyes, squeezed my hands, and suddenly the stage was with me. The crowd’s energy filled my chest. I owned that room.

The technique has carried me into meetings with presidents and prime ministers, into situations where the old me would have withered. Am I truly confident? Perhaps not. But I’ve learned to borrow confidence from my future self, the one who already knows how the story ends.

The Song That Time Forgot

Those mechanical birds on my shelf stopped singing decades ago. Springs unwound, gears seized by time and neglect. But I keep them not as monuments to failure, but as reminders that some songs are worth waiting for.

Sitting here in Switzerland, decades older and infinitely wiser, I realize the Swiss girl didn’t just offer me a dance. She offered me a choice between fear and wonder, between safety and story. I chose safety and lived with the story anyway — the one where the boy was too afraid to say yes.

But here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then: Life is generous with second chances, though they rarely arrive dressed as we expect. I didn’t get to dance in that Lucerne clock shop, but I’ve spent 43 years learning the steps.

Today, I lead artists through landscapes that once intimidated me. I stand on stages that once terrified me. I’ve learned that confidence isn’t the absence of fear — it’s the decision to dance anyway, even when your hands shake, even when you can’t hear the music clearly.

The mountains outside my window are the same ones that witnessed my 19-year-old cowardice. But I am not the same man. Tomorrow, I’ll paint them with hands that know their power, guided by eyes that have learned to see beauty not just in what is, but in what’s possible.

The Invitation You’ve Been Waiting For

The Swiss girl with ribbons in her hair taught me something precious without ever knowing it: Every moment is asking us to dance. Right now, as you read this, some opportunity is standing behind your counter, dressed in work clothes or formal wear or a dirndl, extending an invitation that could change everything.

Will you squeeze your hands, remember your stage, and say yes?

The clock is ticking. The birds are waiting to sing.

Eric Rhoads