After Tai Chi tonight I was driving home mulling on things. Once again that feeling of sort of “forgetting the self” had come very very briefly and it seemed to work. Last time I trained I must’ve been having a bad week as nothing went right for me, but this week it seemed to work.
I was considering the habit of Procrastination in light of my Tai Chi practise. You don’t think about the things in Tai Chi, you just let them happen, so why doesn’t this happen outside the class so much? I am wondering if the trick is to realise that the Tai Chi form never in fact stops, when we’re walking down the street or washing our hands, we’re still doing Tai Chi!
I’m thinking of how it feels to do the form and the best analogy I can think of is that it’s like a railway journey. At first, each position in the form is like a station, the train stops at each one and changes onto a new section of track. Later on, as you practise more, the position changes become more like signal boxes. What I mean by this is, they’re still there but you don’t stop for them, the train shifts fluidly onto its new track.
So what I’m driving at, is the idea of bringing that feeling from Tai Chi into everyday use. We procrastinate when we stop at the station, maybe it would be better to realise that they’re only signal boxes. We don’t in fact stop, we just flow from place to place, from event to event, from task to task. Perhaps, I wonder, when we come to forget the self would it be true that the separation of tasks and events is only in our minds?
Am I making sense?
