I came home from my annual retreat to the mountain on Sunday. It took until today for me to feel as though my practice was back to something resembling normality. Today’s practice was great. And it touched the ecstatic places that I had touched on during my retreat to the mountain.

But in conversation with a friend last night, I realized (mostly because he told me so) that I’m understanding the world from a very pessimistic viewpoint right now. And that my tai chi is a kind of bulwark against all that: “at least there is this one thing I’m doing that I can control.”

But it’s very easy to slip from pessimism to sadness or depression. When one believe the world is slipping into chaos and madness, it’s very hard not to give into despair. My friend lifted me a little, but despite the exhilaration and joy of this last weekend, I’m still in a mindset where I think the world is spiraling the drain and it’s all downhill from here.

My birthday is Monday. That may have something to do with it. 🙂

In the midst of the sadness and worry — about foreign affairs, about manufactured celebrity, about crises foreign and domestic — there is the practice. I nodded at two others of my neighbors this morning during tai chi. No one is batting an eye or caring that I’m doing something weird. No one cares at all.

There’s a power and a joy and a hope in that, I think. The world will not likely change. There will always be crises foreign and domestic, broken attitudes and broken nations and broken systems. And sometime, eventually, my tai chi practice will fail. In the meantime, we practice as we intend to go on. We let others live as they wish, and hope that they let us live as we wish — and we practice what we mean to become.

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