Life is good out here at the little-known Stanford-in-Boston program. I'm taking full advantage of the opportunities here this summer: attending outdoor classical music concerts at the Hatch Shell, swimming in Walden Pond, getting caught in flash thunderstorms and doing bikram yoga in my own home (no air conditioning, and it gets steamy!).

But my favorite activity I've discovered up here is contra dancing, which is a big deal in the Northeast. Indeed, it is also called traditional New England folk dance.

It's been said that contra dancing is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. I can agree with that. The best way to describe it is "ecstatic." Who would think that doing a pattern of moves in two lines could be so fun? I have a few theories.

First off, the music is so happy. It's usually Anglo-Celtic music, with jigs and reels, and Irish, Scottish, French, Canadian and Old-Time tunes performed by live musicians, tunes like "Rose in the Heather" and "Music for a Found Harmonium." Track those down (I like the Patrick Street version of the latter) and see if they don't make you happy. Then imagine listening to music like this for hours and having it in your head for a long time afterwards<\p>--<\p>it's very mood-enhancing.

The dance moves are fun. Remember how as a kid you swung around with people holding hands, leaning back and feeling the (apparent) centrifugal force? Well, you do something like that almost every other move in contra dance, because many of the moves involve "giving weight" or leaning back to create a pull. Decades after childhood, it's still fun to be pulled around by people.

It's acceptable (and hard not) to smile continuously. Sometimes I feel like smiling continuously for long periods, and it's hard to be brave enough to do this in public (try it), but you can smile all you want at contra dance. It's been "shown" that smiling can make you happy, so maybe this is just one of many ways that contra dance gives you a good vibe.

Contra dance has many elements that can induce a flow state, as defined by unspellable psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. Such elements include clear goals (doing the dance right), concentration (remembering the moves and listening to the caller name the moves), a loss of self-consciousness (too busy dancing to think about how you're dancing), a distorted sense of time, an appropriate level of challenge, a sense of personal control (you're dancing, not watching), absorption in the activity and intrinsic rewards (it's a blast).

In particular, contra dancing requires you to concentrate and be "in the moment"<\p>--<\p>not just for 20 minutes of meditation, but for several hours of dancing. If the dance is complicated or if the caller stops naming the moves, you have to stay focused on what you're doing. If you start thinking about the cute guy you're about to dance with or what you're doing after the dance, you'll probably mess up the figure for yourself and the people around you (speaking from experience here).

If you mess up, you mess up the set for the people around you. It might seem counterintuitive, but I think this makes contra dance more fun, as it creates a situation similar to the "keep the ball/balloon up" game, where people make a group effort to keep something going. Games and dances like this build teamwork by creating a situation in which we win together and lose together.

Indeed, when contra dancing, you're literally part of something bigger than yourself. Not only are you involved in a group effort to execute a complicated dance, but individuals are the moving parts of bigger patterns. Your own moves are secondary to the pattern created by lines of people doing these moves in relation to one another. Watching a contra dance, you'll see a bunch of people dancing past each other in symmetric patterns, somehow knowing where to go in the crowd, in what looks like a very organized morning at Grand Central. It's like marching band, with people acting not as individuals but as part of a larger, mesmerizing pattern.

Come to think of it, maybe contra dancers are like rhizomes: seemingly individual shoots that are all part of the same plant. I don't understand the Deleuze and Guattari idea of multiplicity, but someone suggested it might apply.

Another analogy for people being parts of a whole is the Sufi idea that we're all like waves on the ocean<\p>--<\p>that we're all God and individuality is an illusion (ha, then the humanists and theists could agree).

If that's the case, then dying means losing that individuality but becoming (at least temporarily) part of some big amazing thing. I'm not sure whether that happens, but maybe it's not so bad if it's anything like contra dancing!

Andrea Runyan is a super-senior in math and also writes at http://freeideasblog.blogspot.com/. She can be reached at monandreamichelle "at" gmail.com.