Jamaican Skipping Magic

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” -Albert Einstein

Synchronicity and seeming coincidences have been at the heart of my skipping adventure from the very start. So much so that I’m no longer shocked and surprised when it happens, since I’ve come to expect skipping and magic to go hand in hand over the years. But this one that happened the other night definitely deserves repeating.

I was playing pool at happy hour at a local bar/restaurant. A fun song with a great beat was playing on the juke box, and a young man who was also waiting for his name to come up on the chalk board was standing next to me. I started bouncing along to the music and he and I started talking about dancing. I asked him if he was a dancer and he replied that he only knows dances from his home country of Jamaica. So I asked him to show me how they would dance the song we were listening to there.

He started leaping slowly side to side and I did my best to mimic his movements. I had to smile when he started coaching me, “Skip, skip, skip,” he encouraged. Once the song was over I told him about iskip.com and my passion for skipping, and that’s when I recognized synchronicity’s magical hand at work.

He told me that the hottest dance in Jamaica right now is called the “Skip to Ma Luu” and it suddenly all came together in my mind. Just two days before a member of The Skipping Movement’s Facebook page had posted this video on its wall:

It was the very same dance that the random Jamaican man I met by chance was teaching me just two days later. What are the odds!?

Jamaica’s Skip to Ma Luu dance was created by a 12-year old musical artist named QQ and it is sweeping the nation. I love how the song calls out to Sydney Australia, Japan, Johannesburg, London, Berlin, Israel, Paris, Toronto, Montreal, etc. to skip with them! What a glorious manifestation of the skipping movement in action.

Skip on Jamaica! Skip on! Here’s hoping the rest of the world accepts your invitation and gets their skip on too.