00:19:30 Tai Chi

“I want you to time yourself,” said Victor. “See if you can do the whole 108 sequence in 20 minutes.”

“Why 20 minutes?” I asked, “I mean, I know this is the standard asked by the Hong Kong Tai Chi Association. But why is the standard to 20 minutes? Will I achieve an altered state of consciousness if I hit 20 minutes exactly?”

“Just try it.”

In the old days, they used to have a rule where if you had a question you wanted to ask your 師傅 he would tell you to go away and practice for a week. And after one week, if you hadn’t managed to solve the question yourself, only then were you allowed to bother your teacher. Actually, I think there’s a lot of wisdom is setting this time lag, because many questions (such as the one above) are asked in ignorance. Even if the sifu answers, he or she can only answer on a verbal level. “Well, if you do it too fast you won’t taste the details; if you do it too slow you will train your muscles”… that sort of answer. But some questions can only be answered with an experience; words are but an approximation.

So, I tried timing myself one Thursday morning. It really wasn’t the best of mornings, because I hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before, so my mind was racing at 300kmph. But the air was crisp, fresh autumn, and I was glad to be outside in the park.

When I first started tai chi, my kuen would be really affected by my mental state. For example, if I didn’t get enough sleep, or was stressed out by a theatre production, my 套路 performance would really suffer. What I discovered that morning, however, is that my body now knows the way. In the same way that I am able to navigate my path in the dark to the kitchen to get a cup of water without bumping into furniture, my body knows the path of the 108 sequence blindfolded. So even though my mind was running rampant, my body was steadily keeping time. Breath by breath, it was like wading through clear water. And because my breath was steady, my mind gradually allowed itself to be shepherded back into the fold.

When I finished, I looked at the watch. Nineteen minutes and thirty seconds. Ha!
I timed myself again on Sunday. Twenty minutes thirty seconds. Ha!

But numbers are meaningless. Time is but a physical structure. It was fun to know that I could do it, but inside I know the quality of my practice is not at cutting edge.

“I still prefer to do it slower,” I told Victor the next week. “Here I’m catching the flow of the kuen. It’s like I’m listening to the flow. But I feel to really progress, I need to really take time and taste the details.”

“It’s two separate things,” he said. “You should practice the listening to the flow, but you should also take fragments of the sequence and study it in detail.”

“And then put it back into the sequence,” I said. “I know. I know.”

But it’s one thing to know with the brain, and another to be able to grok it.

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