Opinion | Want to Have a Better Year? Just Dance.

The dancing began two summers ago at a lovely, large hotel in coastal Turkey. Whether our hosts were bad at marketing or good at money laundering, the hotel defied one of the fundamental laws of lodging: There were no lodgers, other than us. The staff outnumbered the guests (me; my wife, Jessica; and our daughter, Agnes, then 5 years old) roughly four to one.

One evening, as the hired music man worked his synthesizers to an empty dance floor, the servers, apparently tiring of watching us eat dinner again, shimmied themselves into a chorus line — straight backs, arms interlinked, napkin corners pinched between fingertips.

As traditional Turkish music took over, they performed what was most likely a version of the halay dance, their shoulders surging to the beat. At their summons, we abandoned our towers of lamb and eggplant to shoulder-thrust alongside them. More staff members emerged from unknown hide-outs and together we made a joyous caravan through the sultry Mediterranean night.

We wound up dancing every remaining night of our stay — with the staff, with new friends we’d hauled up from the nearby village, with the manager and her daughter. We shook and swished, flushed with the joy of physical movement in response to harmonious sound.

For me, this was both familiar and forgotten: I was born in the Soviet Union, where no respectable restaurant dared go without a dance platform. Even my family dinners weren’t immune from sentimental swaying to the sounds of a combed-over crooner after tea and dessert. People dance in the United States, of course, but they dance mostly in places sanctioned for dancing, like weddings, concert venues, and clubs. In the Soviet Union, we were too unfree not to exploit every opportunity to let loose.

My daughter will never know what it was like to grow up where I did. But as she moved with melodramatically solemn concentration on that patio in Turunç, I watched a girl transported by spontaneous, unscheduled movement. And not only her own. She was seeing her parents not only as harried people bowed by work and chores. We were dancers.

I wanted her to feel this again. So when I was planning a trip to Spain, I called flamenco schools in Madrid until I found one that would give a private lesson to a father-child duo. Reader, hips swayed. Agnes was garbed in a pink flamenco dress and we both made the twirling hand motion flamenco dancers perform, snapping castanets while our instructor, the beautiful and severe Señora Barceló, drove her zapatos de baile — dance shoes — into the well-scuffed studio floor.

Since then, every family trip abroad has involved a detour for dance. We’ve taken break-dancing lessons in London. We’ve turned disapproving Austrian heads by dancing on the snowbound sidewalks of Salzburg. Our feet have tested hotel bedsprings in Finland to the sound of Alice Cooper.

The painfully plain lesson of these experiences has been that, no matter what ails you, a body does better after a bout of dancing. Dance is a trespass of boundaries, an immigration into spaces and forms that previously held only air or a partner. The strength required by dance admits vulnerability, and proves that fluidity, not rigidity — movement, progress, exchange — is beauty. It is a courtship of athleticism and physicality from which one emerges revitalized, lofted, ecstatic.

When children become frightened, they stiffen. When they’re happy, they can hardly keep their shape. That’s the looseness that dancing collects into rhythm. An acquaintance once compared the first sensation of alcohol in the system to the drop of an elevator. Dancing is when the elevator goes up. You’ll be getting off on a very different floor from the one where you got on.

Jessica and I may have known this once, but — careers, children, political darkness, our perishing planet — it has taken these trips to remind us. Jessica, who has danced tango weekly for years, has increased her allotment to two nights a week; in addition, recently, she jumped around like a teenager, alone, at a K-pop club night at Irving Plaza. I have reclaimed the club days of my youth — I dance all night, also alone, whenever one of my favorite D.J.s comes through Musica or Silo in New York, near where we live, or the Concourse Project in Austin, where I teach. For some reason, it seems critical to have these experiences by ourselves, in communion with something lost or taken from us without our permission.

Then there are the impromptu dance sessions around the kitchen island at home with Agnes and my son, Montgomery, who is 4: Salt-N-Pepa, Snap!, the Stones. The children’s formlessness and spontaneity seem crucial. Whenever we sign up Agnes for proper lessons, she gets politely kicked out, because she wants to follow only the sounds in her head. In a politics and economy that basically feel like closing nooses, this abandon feels like freedom.

Of course, Agnes has no real idea who Donald Trump is, but when I am dancing, neither do I. I do worry about the same things as every person of conscience in this country does, but, as far as Agnes knows, I’m a dancer. That is, I also feel hope — for instance, that she and Montgomery are young enough for something better to come around by the time they are teenagers. Not only politically but technologically, a world where people move not only fingers across screens, but whole bodies, when they are able.

In the meantime, we have a salve. We put on the music. We extend our hands. We put our bodies in motion. It’s not an easy time for dancing. But for us, it was time to unclench and let ourselves go.

Boris Fishman is a novelist whose most recent book is “The Unwanted.” He teaches at the University of Austin.

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