I’ve started learning large san shou in my Tai Chi class. While it’s fun to be practicing another interactive form of the Yang style, it’s also a little scary to be learning something new as my teacher nears retirement (when he reaches 60 in four years). I’m starting to worry that I won’t reach a level where I can practice effectively on my own before his time is up.
At 2 classes a week, 52 weeks a year, and 4 years left to go, we can expect roughly 416 classes total; every class is worth 0.24% of a very limited resource.
A classmate once told me that his coming retirement is a good thing. We’ll be forced to go elsewhere to expand our knowledge of Tai Chi, because we reach certain limitations when practicing with the same partners, skill levels, partners, styles, body types, and even teachers. While I understand his reasoning, it doesn’t change the fact that I may not be able to continue learning what I know now, if another teacher doesn’t offer the same curriculum.
Added to this is the fact that martial Tai Chi teachers are hard to find in a city as small as this. Good teachers, especially ones suited to your learning style, with the right balance of patience and discipline, are even less common.
It makes me wonder where I’ll be with my Tai Chi progress in four years.
Speaking from experience as a long-term practitioner and teacher, each student’s taiji skill and knowledge will depend on the number of years of attentive training as well as whatever aptitude he or she can bring to their studies as well as whatever relevant studies he or she may undertake to deepen their knowledge and “round it out”.
Your teacher is the sum of both his life and taiji experience, for good and for bad, and, similarly, you can only be the sum of your own life and experience.
This can be comforting but it also provides further challenges as suggested by Anatole France though he wasn’t talking about taiji at the time: “An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It‘s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don‘t.”
Anyway, learning taiji is like any road you travel… you get lost, you wander down dead-ends and eventually you may get so comfortable with the travel that you stop paying attention and daydream your trip away or cause an accident.
Obsessing about the destination so that you don’t savor the journey is not much better. In the end, the road of life has the same destination for all of us so enjoy the trip as much as you can!
Admittedly, I have the habit of obsessing about the destination. It’s something I’ve been trying to fight in the last few years, where I constantly wonder if I’m on the right path, doing what will be best in the long run, to the point where I lose enjoyment of the moment.
The ephemeral nature of our lives makes our choices seem so permanent and critical. I’m still learning to the balance the long-term and short-term, with all the other variables and unknowns thrown in there.
Dead-ends in Tai Chi seem especially scary, when it takes so many years to achieve practical results. Sometimes, I have to remind myself that going somewhere is as fun as getting there.