Divisions and Precisions

T'ai Chi

I really love my t'ai chi class so far. (I may not love it tomorrow, but that remains to be seen.) Tonight we really started to work. Last week was all introduction -- like I said, we learned to walk. Tonight we learned warm-ups and the first part of the form. The form is almost like a dance. We saw part of it last week. It's slow and even and smooth, and really quite amazing to see. It's a series of 108 moves that flow into one another. Tonight we learned like maybe the first two minutes of what is usually a 25 minute routine.

Tonight I learned it's a lot harder than it looks. Slow, smooth movements almost means that your muscles work harder, or at least it feels that way. It's a different sort of work from any other exercise class I've done though. I'm not sure how to describe it. I guess part of it is because it's not aerobic. It isn't all about expending energy. I like that, cause I've never been all about expending energy. In fact, you could say that I expend as little energy as possible. It's a match made in heaven!

Seriously, I got it tonight, briefly. In the middle of working on the first few moves of the form, in the middle of "Damn, my calf muscle hurts, wait that's the wrong move, okay what's the teacher doing, am I doing this right, what time is it?" everything cleared and crystallized, and in those moments my mind was clear and it was just me, my movement, and my breathing. It was remarkable. Everything just fell into place. I want that feeling again. I want to be able to get there and stay there for a time. Who knows? Maybe I'll continue with this for a while. There are worse things I could do.

It reminded me a little of how I used to feel when I was into SCA dance. There was a sense of being graceful, and that blissful feeling of your body taking over a movement that you knew so well you didn't have to think about it, so you could concentrate less on the broad mechanical aspects and focus more on the detail of making it perfect. Yes, it was very similar to that. Without the music and flirting of course, but one can't have everything.

I never imagined I'd take something even remotely like a martial arts class. Whoa.