Practice

Saturday morning. It was hard to get out of a warm bed since things had been crazy at work. Two nights before I had met one of my colleagues at the office at 10 p.m. in order to prepare a Christmas surprise. She said I looked quite perky at 2:30 a.m. when we finished. But this morning I was not. I put on an old navy wool sweater and drank hot water with lemon and honey. The sun broke through the mix of clouds intermittently. Tiny orange mandarin globes hung heavily on the broken branch I had rescued in the park. It lit up my table.

I had promised to be at tai chi that morning as Bill, our teacher, would not be. I did not like to take the class by myself, but I was the next senior student on this December morning in 1997. For the past seven years, I had picked up the weapons bag I made from a pair of blue jeans and headed out every Saturday morning to 50 Oak Street, a crumbling old building where our class met. And so I did, going down the hill to catch the bus, arriving to take the ancient elevator to the third floor, riding up with dancers from the Lines company going to practice just above us. The rambling building was full of big rooms rented to various arts organizations, always interesting.

Sun shone on the dust motes in the air in front of our big windows. I changed into my cotton tai chi clothes and flat velveteen Chinese shoes. And just as I called the class to attention, there were Caden and Emiko in the doorway. I breathed a sigh of relief. They were both wonderful teachers, Caden from Taiwan and Japanese Emiko. We all relaxed as they got ready and then we took our positions, Caden in the lead.

We began with the silent slow set, which generally took 40 minutes. I was aware of the beginners, dropping out to work with some in the corner of the room. But then, Caden brought us all back together to work on particular parts of the set. “Push from the back foot. Your opponent is in front of you. Don’t turn too much. You must sit, or everything else will be wrong.”

I was mesmerized by his lightness and the concentrated power of his energy. Many of the new people had never had him for a teacher, but I always loved his classes. I could see that he loved to teach as well. But he had a job with commitments all over the world. He could not be with us often.

After class I took the bus and climbed Russian hill to my apartment. My legs ached and I was so hungry I could barely wait for my omelet to cook! My legs buzzed and throbbed, especially my thighs and around my hips. When I was finally able to tuck them under a blanket to warm them, it felt lovely.

For many years I did tai chi obsessively, often three or four classes a week and many workshops and camps. It answered social as well as physical and emotional needs. I was living alone, and I learned much from practice, but also from the shifting collection of long-time students, who came together from Europe as well as across the United States. So many extraordinary banquets in the “approved” Chinese restaurants around town. So many ecstatic classes practicing our many sets. So many mornings arriving in one emotional state and leaving in a better one.

But once in a while I wondered. If I wasn’t spending all my extra time and money on tai chi, what would I be doing? While living alone, I was acutely tuned to the choices I made, my only real currency. The alternative I returned to most would have been to rent a small place in a country town north of the city, going up there each weekend, getting to know it, finding ways to garden, to know people. But the success of such a project was not guaranteed. Work tied me to the city. Tai chi grew more meaningful over the years.

I have often envied people who stay close to their birthplace, whose roots are tangled in a rich soil of relatives and people they have known all their lives; people steeped in traditions which will not leave them, even if they try; people who have free minds and actions which changed as they grew; people whose connection to the land they live on is absolute. This did not happen to me. I have been an itinerant worker and thinker, taking one road and then another.

Tai chi was a strange attractor for me indeed, completely outside my experience. But I have loved Chinese poetry since I found an anthology of translations in my high school library and John Blofeld’s books about Taoism captured my imagination at least ten years before I began to practice. In class there was no mention of philosophy or poetry (other than the inherently poetic names of the movements). The point was to practice.

Tai chi practice is about physical mastery. Master Tung, whose Kai Ying Tung Academy is the over-arching school, teaches it as a soft martial art. He is very powerful, but forestalls any sense of competition by saying the person who began to study earlier is the senior student. As Caden noted, effective practice keeps an opponent in mind. But, as Master Tung says, “The goal is to attain serenity, tranquility, and the discovery of oneself. It is truly an exercise of the mind.”

For me it was a revelation. Bad at games all my life, I found tai chi something I could do! It collects the body and mind into a whole, concentrating them into movements which are beautiful when done correctly. It took a long time to approximate good form, gaining stability, rounding the body and executing movements for which the only variation should be the shape of one’s own body. It is a case in which the inner and outer selves cannot be separated.

But I was a normal person. I had a lot going on. After the early years, I seldom spent the money to go to intensive workshops. I took class for granted. And when an even more compelling attractor in the form of a life partner came along, tai chi slipped in my priorities.

Many years have passed since my early concentrated study, but I still try to practice at least some part of the sets every day. I am grateful I spent so much time, as it is something that stays with me, helping circulation, mental clarity and composure. My partner, Don, knows all the sets as well and we can practice together. He is often better technically, but I have studied longer and the sets live in my body memory. Together we are a good team. It has been an especially useful practice during a locked down pandemic year.

Doing tai chi I cannot separate the inner from the outer. These days, practicing in a densely populated city, on playgrounds or plazas, I am often wary. We turn in all directions during the set, eyes wide, taking in the sky, the trees, the people. If the environment requires more than ordinary attention, my concentration suffers and I lose my place in the set. Didn’t we just do “cloud hands”? Does “brush knee” come next?

We try to leave plenty of air space between ourselves and others when practicing. We do not want to disturb anyone. It is an unfamiliar practice in our Hispanic community in any case, but our habit is respected. One memorable evening, when an imposing man who had been threatening everyone on the plaza came over to our corner, our companion skateboarders rushed him, protecting us.

It is impossible to know where an alternative life would take us. We may stand in the yellow wood, looking down the divergent roads as far as we can. But, sorry we cannot take them both “and be one traveler,” we must take one or the other. The arrow of time moves in only one direction. We cannot go back.

I did not have much sense of choice growing up, but it turned out that the relative affluence of my generation’s circumstances, and the width of the horizon led to lots of choice. When I look back, I have no regrets. I could not have done other than I did.