Today’s tai chi form took about 11 minutes to perform. It felt rushed. This is an improvement on how things used to be, though. When nine minutes feels rushed, that means that normal is about 15 minutes, and deliberate is about 25 minutes. Neither of the qi gong sequences were slow enough, though, and I think that the rushédness of the form today derived from not being deliberate enough with preliminaries.
And I like that. Now I not only have slowed down my form, but I have a sense of how to slow it down further. Progress.
I hesitate to speak about this, since these sorts of things can change pretty much at any time. Yet I realized in conversation with some friends that I am somewhat unusual — I’m in my 40s and I take no medications. A friend of mine has just come back from a lengthy road trip, and she was saying that most of her friends that she stayed with along the way take fairly large numbers of pills. The three of us sitting at dinner could think of only two people between us who weren’t medicated in some way: blood pressure medication, head medication, lung medication, joint medication, and so on — nearly all of it prescription medications. And I don’t use any of it. I don’t know if I can attribute that to tai chi or to generally positive eating habits, but I do wonder if there’s a connection. I don’t even take over-the-counter stuff like aspirin, or any home remedies; I make spagyrics, and I’ve never had to use them for their nominal uses. When I was sick a few weeks ago, I had some packets of Emergen-C immune booster or something like that. Certainly no regular/daily medications.
I don’t know if this is alarming or not, really. And I don’t know about my colleagues at school. But it’s worth thinking on.
