Today I finished 60 push-ups in 3 sets of 20.  No stress, no muss, no fuss.  Twenty push-ups, and then Five Golden Coins. Twenty push-ups, and then Eight Pieces of Silk. Twenty push-ups, and then the tai chi form.  Easy.

No, not easy.  Easy today.  But I look back to when I first did ten push-ups… It’s taken me a hundred days of god-awful effort to get to this point.  More like 108 days.  It’s taken a mala of practice to get to the point where I can do three sets of twenty push-ups, and now we’re starting the mala over again.

What’s a Mala?  I hear you ask.  It’s a Buddhist ‘rosary’ I suppose, a set of 108 beads in a string designed to help meditation. A mantra is said aloud or mentally on each bead, as its passed around in one’s hand.

When was the last time you did something for 108 days consistently?  That’s the essence of daily practice, generally. For a Buddhist, it might be saying the mantra of their beads for 108 times, for 108 days.  For me, apparently, it was a 108-day journey of doing a few push-ups daily until I could do sixty.  And now I think I’m trying for Blue Flame Magic’s goal of 120, and beyond.  And I’m still questing for 20 nose-to-the-floor push-ups.

What about the sonnets? I hear you say.

Don’t worry, they’re still there.  Here’s the first sonnet, and you can read more or less in order from there, to understand my whole tai chi form.  Eventually, I’ll provide you with a single page to view them all.  But right now, there’s not time to create a single long page from all of the sonnets, so you’ll have to go page-by-page to read them yourself.

Liked it? Take a second to support Andrew on Patreon!