Yesterday I didn’t do tai chi until 3:30. By then I’d stiffened up quite a bit. Leaving the work til that late in the day results in a clunky practice with a lot of twinges and little pulls at my joints. Vladimir Horowitz said, “when I skip a day of practice, I notice.” I didn’t even skip a day, but just doing it later in the day really fowled me up.

So I resolved to do it this morning, relatively early. Today’s practice was better, even though it was in a relatively tiny space in our hotel room.

Small spaces are a bugaboo. This was a corridor, regulation width for a wheelchair and not much more. The ceiling is so low that my hands are on the ceiling during any pose where my hands go above my head. This isn’t a favorite environment for me. I like a big empty room with a high ceiling or open sky.

Make virtue of necessity. I sank down into a low horse stance for all of the qi gong, and kept it for more than half of the tai chi form. This gave me another four or five inches over my head to work with. I also took a lot of really small steps, discovering what was an effective movement in such cramped quarters and what wasn’t.

Odd experience? Yes. Did it raise chi? Yes, oddly enough.

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