I’m visiting my parents today. When I came into the house, my dad responded to be with gusto: “hey, look at you!” when commenting on my weight and my belly. He hasn’t seen me in a month. I was very surprised of course. I see me every day, so I don’t notice the changes in me that tai chi is causing, necessarily: more physically fit, more muscular, healthier skin, flatter belly… I don’t notice these things because certain metrics, like my weight, haven’t changed much. It’s possible that I will always weigh around what I weigh now, just that I’ll have my weight differently distributed between fat, bone and muscle, and will have different outside appearances based on those factors.
I did taichi in my bedroom this morning, because to wake up and go downstairs to do it outside would wake the house and my parents now like to sleep in a little. I feel like I could go wake them now, and remind them of weekend chores and the paper route and suchlike. Except I won’t. Too mean
Anyway, as I did taichi my skin heated up. It’s a strange sensation, getting warm all over. It’s even stranger when you get warm all over and know that this fire is internal. I imagine all the little cells sitting at home, and it gets dark, so they all switch on their mitochondria and ramp up the energy use. And I experience it as a surface heat. My dad sees it as “my son is losing weight,” even when I’m not. Funny things, no?
