What is "quiet" time?

How do you define your "quiet" time?  How do you relax? Recharge?  Especially if you are an "on-the-go-24-hours-per-day" kind of person, how do you find time to relax, rest, and how do you get to a place where you feel like that is worthwhile and not merely a waste of time?

Many of the dancers at our program are high achieving students, dancing multiple days a week.  They are athletes, actors, singers, and deeply committed to things they care about: their families, baking, the environment, investigating other cultures.... the list goes on and on.  So how does a young person prioritize and then STILL find time to rest, relax, or take a risk?

One conversation I had with a student this afternoon ended with me encouraging her to go out and (literally) play in the mud this weekend.  Get absolutely filthy dirty, love it, then go home and shower.  If we are always following the road map, with fear of getting lost, we may be missing out on so much.

This conversation led to a larger discussion about how the kind of people we are often parallels the kind of dancer we are: if you are an organizer -- someone who loves order and structure, you may be this kind of mover.  If you are a risk taker, someone who easily "goes with the flow", you might dance with more abandonment.  Many of the students agreed with this, like they had suddenly realized they dance like their personality!

An interesting article, Dance moves can reveal your personality from publication The Telegraph, looks at the styles and trends of movements on a dance floor and the corresponding personality types of those movers.  My favorite highlights:

• "People use body motions as reliable indicators of others' personality types, and even the movements of robots have been shown to elicit attributes of 'personality' by observers."
• Michelle Groves, associate dean at the faculty of education at the Royal Academy of Dance, said professional dancers were trained to express their emotions when they danced and tended to hide their personalities, but this would be less obvious in untrained people.
• Dr Peter Lovatt, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire and a former professional dancer, said dancing and movement could convey subtle messages about the way people are feeling and thinking, which has its routes deep in our evolutionary history.
• "Confidence plays an important role in the way people dance. Self esteem also plays an important role and this can influence a person's personality."

So that leads me to more questions: are confident, more bodily comfortable people drawn to dance, or does dance shape you into this kind of person?  And if your personality draws you to structure and organization and a need to keep busy, how do you truly find rest?  Should you go out and play in the mud?  Should you paint, get messy, be daring? With it help to relax your movement in a technique class, or encourage you to take more risk?  I'd be curious to see!