My wife and I are coming on to three years taking T’ai Chi with Michael and Sara Stenson, who themselves have done T’ai Chi for something like three decades. Cheng Man-ch’ing brought the simplified form to the United States in the seventies, and Michael and Sara learned from his students.
But this posting is really about motivation and its lack. Vicki and I take a class every Monday evening. It’s essential to practice the form between classes. I did when we first began. I don’t now.
Yet I enjoy attending class. A great bunch of people there, most of them in their forties and up. I suppose my form has improved over the years, but it’s a physical meditation, a series of movements that appears simple but requires intense concentration on matters of balance, relaxation, precise placement of the knees, fluidity of the hips, and so much more.
I resist.
I also resist going to the health club we belong to. I don’t go. I’ve stopped going.
I know it’s the right thing to do. I love walking in the mornings, feeding the dogs along the way, Oscar, Molly, Bad Dog, and Also Ran (our names for them). But treadmills and weight machines, no matter how unlike high school gym they try to make the surroundings, turn me right the hell off.
Motivation too fuels the best writing.
I’m currently highly motivated to blog. Perhaps that too will flag, perhaps not. Lately, writing hasn’t gone as smoothly as earlier in my career. In part, that’s because of the sea change this country has undergone in the last six years (we’ll get into all of that in upcoming posts). Suddenly, I want my writing to matter more. Shifts in the political climate affect what one writes about, the subjects you choose or that choose you.
Blogs I see as a way of priming the pump, finding a new strength of voice, exploring what really matters to me, both in small things and large.
The choices before a writer are truly infinite, what tales to tell, within what conflicts to embroil one’s characters. But those choices must deeply engage the passions of the writer, else why bother?
Ah, the workday beckons…
That’s a wrap!