Last night, I was doing some sewing. When you’re sewing, you need three core tools always at the ready: an ironing board, an iron, and a sewing machine. Also a pinning station, but thats usually a place rather than a specific tool. Anyway, I put away the iron when I was done, but left out the ironing board. It’s a little thing, maybe seven inches high off the ground. It’s a small, apartment-based board, rather than a full-sized one. It’s challenged my sewing capabilities a few times: how to iron this big thing on that little board? Do you feel lucky, punk?
So the ironing board was still in the room where I do tai chi in the morning, and in the way. So, I simply did tai chi over and around it. Instead of moving it, I treated it as a fixture of the room, around which I had to alter my tai chi paths.
Twice in the early part of the form, I simply stepped over it. As I did so, I inserted two moves from elsewhere in the form, I thought pretty smoothly: golden pheasant stands on left leg, followed by the right leg version of the same movement. Once I kicked it, and moved it to a new place. I like that my skill with the forms has grown to the extent that I can do a little editorializing on the fly, and that I’m not rigidly locked into doing the form exactly the same way. I’m starting to be able to riff on the moments as if it was an improv performance.
