I can’t read music. I don’t think in intervals or chord progressions. When people talk about time signatures or key changes, I nod along the way you do when someone’s explaining a dream — politely, with no real foothold.

So I’ve been sitting with this question: do I actually understand music? Or do I just enjoy it, which isn’t the same thing?

Here’s where I’ve landed, at least for now.

I’m learning to dance — contra, fusion, other forms — and each one is its own language. There’s the kinesthetic vocabulary, the lead/follow conversation, the spatial awareness of a room full of moving bodies. No one would say I don’t grok dance just because I haven’t formalized every layer of it. The understanding lives in the accumulation, not in any single fluency.

And dancing has been teaching me music in ways I didn’t recognize as learning. I feel when a phrase is about to resolve before I could name it as an eight-bar phrase. I sense the difference between music that swings and music that drives. I know when a break is coming. None of that is theoretical — it lives in my body, not on a page — but it’s real structural understanding.

I think the mistake is treating the notational, numbered way of knowing music as the real understanding, with everything else being a lesser approximation. But the person who hears chord progressions, the person who cries at a melody, and the dancer who feels phrase structure through movement aren’t ranked. They’re different surfaces touching the same thing. You wouldn’t say someone doesn’t grok food because they can’t write a recipe in French.

Maybe grokking isn’t a destination at all. Maybe it’s what I’m already doing — moving between partial languages, letting each one illuminate the others, getting more comfortable in the spaces between them.

I started this asking whether I understand music. I think the answer is: I’m already doing it, and the worry was the only part that was off.