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Expectations and Uncertainty

P1090012Hoping to be able to post more often again, as it seems things are calming down a little. I’ve spent much of this month running back and forth to Beijing filming TV segments, but that might be over now.

We advanced through two rounds of 我要上春晚 (I want to perform New Years Eve) and filmed a third, but we did not advance through the third and final round. My immediate reaction was disappointment, followed by optimism. “Hey!” I thought, “at least I will get to go home for Christmas!”

However, that silver lining remains in question, even doubtful. As I have mentioned, the TV producers in Beijing have changed dates on us again and again, and time and again we were on the verge of just dropping the whole thing because keeping going was so costly and uncertain. But each time they assured us that we would certainly advance to the Spring Festival Gala, these second and third rounds were just necessary formalities, so if we could just accommodate them a little more, everything would be fine. Now, one is left wondering if those assurances had any truth or if they were just manipulations designed to keep us on the hook.

What it comes down to is that neither my master nor I feel entirely certain, after the situation has already altered so shockingly so many times, that it won’t do so once again. We are not deluding ourselves as to the nature of the TV people, nor as to the probability that we will be able to be on the spring festival show. Like Aesop’s scorpion and frog, we know the nature of our companions in this venture. And we know that we are almost certainly not going to be in the gala. But I have decided to wait patiently for the last flicker of hope to die before I hop on a plane. And I don’t know if that spark will be snuffed before Christmas.

I am sure some people will read this and think I am being naive, clinging to illusory hopes. On the contrary, I feel I am just doing what I should as a disciple. I personally think that the best thing for our Wudang culture and lineage is to carry on training good students to be good masters. But my master feels that it is the Dao that we take advantage of this high-profile opportunity if we can. Though it has been hard to do, if we can do it we will do more for Wudang kungfu’s visibility than we could do with hundreds of thousands of dollars by another means. If you think about it that way, the annoyances I am going through are very small relative to what might be achieved. And I have a good life here, training and improving myself — I am not really losing anything by being patient.

Except maybe Christmas. So here’s hoping I see you all at home for the holidays, and if not, I’ll be back in February.

Oh, and here is the link to our second round. If you look closely, you can see me miss a cue because the speakers were right in my ears 🙂 Our part starts at about 32 minutes.

http://tv.cntv.cn/video/C21299/5875d1fc495049888018cc086e21e3f9

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Exciting Goings On

Beijing Demo 01I’ve fallen out of my rhythm with my blog for the last month or more, on account of all the exciting goings-on here in Wudang.

The biggest holiday of the year in China and many other Asian countries it the Spring Festival, the new years celebration of the traditional lunar calendar. Much like watching the ball drop in New York City for Americans, Chinese television features one big gala TV event on the eve of Spring Festival. It is a sort of variety show, with different acts over the course of the evening, celebrity MCs, and lots of pageantry. But while Wikipedia says that 22.6 million Americans watched Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve in 2012, past Spring Festival galas have had a viewership of 700-800 million, while this year it is projected to reach a billion people.

When I say exciting goings-on, I mean that my classmates and I have the opportunity to compete for a place on this show. In the end of August, five of us choreographed and rehearsed a demonstration of Wudang kungfu that we traveled to Beijing to perform on a competition show called 我要上春晚 (I want to perform New Years Eve). We won, and then our entire class won a second round of competition in September. We will do one more round in early December, and if all goes well we’ll be in Beijing for a chunk of January preparing for the big event itself.

This is exciting, a great opportunity for us to help our shifu promote his school and a once-in-a-lifetime experience for all of us. But as is frequently the case with once-in-a-lifetime experiences, it is requiring no small amount of sacrifice and determination to realize.

First, of course, we would never be considered for such an event if we had not put a great deal of effort and dedication into our training already. We are foreigners who are seeking a deep understanding of a uniquely Chinese philosophy and tradition that is even beyond the comprehension of many natives of this language and culture.

However, it is hard for some of us to adapt our outlook to an entertainment environment. I don’t think anyone would ever endure the training we have done in order to get on TV — there must be easier ways. So it is difficult for some of us to accept that the culmination of more than four years of deeply personal struggle and agonizing progress, which each of us has undergone for personal reasons verging on religious conviction, should be the seemingly trivial outlet of television performance.

Second, there have been endless challenges of planning and re-planning. The director of the show is understandably busy managing and orchestrating all the many acts vying for a place in the show, so our performance dates have been changed and changed again. And again. This would not be a problem any other time of the year, but with it being illegal for us as foreigners to stay in China for more than 12 months at a stretch without crossing the borders, and our regular yearly holiday falling in December/January, my classmates and I have been put to great effort and expense adjusting flight bookings and travel plans over and over.

I am lucky, and unlucky. Because I stay in America longer than my classmates in order to save the money I need for training each year, my 12 months in-country will not be over until March. But that means I must stay through the holidays and miss Christmas with my family and friends, and that is a bit of a downer. But even if this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is a bit of a double edged sword, I am pretty excited to be part of it.

I do not know for how long this link will be active, but here is our performance in round one of the qualifying competition. Not bad for a start, but we can and will do better.

http://search.cctv.com/playVideo.php?qtext=20131006+%E6%88%91%E8%A6%81%E4%B8%8A%E6%98%A5%E6%99%9A&detailsid=4ead6b4cfd7f46dc8f8b2b948b13052f&aid=C21299&title=[%E6%88%91%E8%A6%81%E4%B8%8A%E6%98%A5%E6%99%9A]%E6%AD%A6%E6%9C%AF%E8%A1%A8%E6%BC%94%E3%80%8A%E6%AD%A6%E9%81%93%E6%97%A0%E7%95%8C%E3%80%8B%20%E8%A1%A8%E6%BC%94%EF%BC%9A%E6%AD%A6%E5%BD%93%E9%81%93%E5%AE%B6%E6%AD%A6%E6%9C%AF%E9%98%9F%2020131006

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Usefully Useless

DSC_0003Years ago, Shifu sat my class down for a lecture on Daoism and culture, and in the true Daoist tradition of illuminating paradoxes, began by writing these words on the blackboard:

 有用无用

无用有用

Which means, “Useful is useless and useless is useful.” He explained thus. Imagine a can of paint. It is useful because you can paint a wall with it, but just sitting there in the can it’s not really serving any purpose, so it’s useless. Take the paint out of the can and spread it on a wall, it is now useful because it is serving its role as cover and color, but now that it is on the wall it can never do anything else, and is really kind of useless to you — you can’t take it off again and spread it anywhere else.

A few years ago, I came to realize that I was not being very welcoming toward short-term students passing through our school. I empathized with them, knowing that if I was a newcomer in a strange place, I would want the people already established there to be friendly and open to me. But my time was all so useful already — I trained many hours a day, and when I wasn’t training I was studying or resting up for the next training session. Every minute of the day was accounted for this way. All my time was useful to me, which made it useless for camaraderie and human generosity.

On the other hand, think of a stereotypical working family man. His time is useful to his boss, to his company, to his family, to his children — but kind of useless to him. When can he spend time on his own health and well-being? He can’t — useless

But sometimes I take some time out of my day and set it aside to be useless. After training sometimes I sit on the stoop of our dormitory and see if anyone comes and talks to me. I don’t always do this, and when I do it doesn’t always amount to much. But that time never fails to be precious in my mind. I have nice leisurely conversations, meet new people, deepen existing friendships, or have a few minutes to reflect on my day, or sometimes I just realize the weather is much nicer than I had previously noticed. My useless time ever proves useful.

There are certainly limits to this, and I think they are frequently defined by the boundaries of moderation and good sense. A useless half-hour watching TV might prove useful, provoking, and stimulating, but a useless 5 hours on the sofa thumbing the remote seems unlikely to yield any rich bounty.

We must strive to be constructive, to be helpful to others, to take care of ourselves, to cultivate our character and our connection with the people around us. But this axiom reminds us that we benefit by making room in our lives for potential that can be realized into new and real concrete good, and by accepting that when that solid usefulness fails, new possibilities are opened.

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X-men: Paradigms of Perfect Health

Colossus_and_WolverineAny description of life for me and my class would be incomplete without some small mention of hypothetical X-men questions. If you aren’t familiar with the X-men, I’ll refer you to the movies that have come out over the last few years portraying these superhero mutants from Marvel comic books, each with distinctive super-human abilities. If you are familiar with the X-men, you may have played this game yourself with some friends. You ask, “Would you rather have Storm’s powers or Rogue’s?” Or “Would you rather be able to teleport or be able to fly?” The question on my mind today is this: which is better, Colossus’s hard invulnerability or Wolverine’s seemingly infinite healing capacity?

Now bear with me. I know this question is pointless, except in that it parallels my own shifting sense of what is healthy. When I was living and exercising in the U.S., I used to think a hard muscle was a strong muscle. I suspect many people out there think the same way. However, others may have changed their minds, like I did. I have come to believe that a happy, strong muscle is soft. A hard muscle is one that can not relax. Either through bad posture habits or chronic mental tension, the muscle is always in a state of contraction. Often this hardness is even a sign of weakness: a muscle in the body that is too weak to do its job efficiently gradually locks down into a sort of brittle death grip. Hardness is a sign of blocked circulation and imminent failure, not strength. A healthy muscle has strength ample for the tasks that will be asked of it, and is able to relax when not called upon to contract. Because it is loose, blood, fluid, and nutrients circulate freely and easily within it and through it to other parts of the body, so it recovers from injury more easily.

I have also come to think about the immune system in a similar way. I feel like in the west no one trusts their immune system very much. We go to great lengths to keep microorganisms outside our skin, because we take it for granted that once they’re in they will do us harm. This seems to me to be a brittle and ultimately futile strength. Though we must be careful not to take in too many pathogens or toxins, accepting that we are permeable to our environment seems vital to me. The body has mechanisms that filter toxins, generate cells, and repair what is broken. We must trust in these sometimes, augment and strengthen them, and they will serve us much better than gallons of hand sanitizer.

Sound familiar? Kind of like Colossus and Wolverine, right? Not so much? Oh well, that doesn’t matter. What I think is important is spreading a more accurate idea of what a healthy body really is. If, when we train, we focus on how to strengthen and augment the body’s natural resilience, we stand a much better chance of weathering the health obstacles that life throws in our path.

Why do I ponder the relative merits of comic book heroes? What can I say — my class spends an awful lot of time together, and these days, who isn’t a nerd at heart?

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Push-hands with the Elements

IMG_3548There is a common two-person Tai Chi practice walled tuishou, or push-hands. It seems, from what I have seen, that it varies in its details from school to school, but I hope the core practice is the same. Two practitioners stand and push one another, trying to maintain constant contact while looking for the opening to unbalance their partner. The secret, as far as I have grasped it, is the smooth and accurate transition from pushing to yielding in perfect synchronicity with your partner’s transition: when the other person is pushing at 80% power, you are exactly 80% yielding. When they are 30% yielding, you are exactly 30% pushing. One can not be always pushing or always yielding: obviously always yielding gets you knocked over, and always pushing seems strong but against a skilled opponent gets overbalanced. Clearly this requires great skill and sensitivity. There is no single “answer” that solves the “problem” each and every time, only by reacting well to the constantly changing situation does one stay on one’s feet.

In this way, push-hands becomes one way to understand Taiji. Taiji is the Daoist philosophy of ever-shifting opposites. This is the philosophy the physical practice of Taijiquan attempts to capture. This practice has in turn become known (somewhat confusingly) as just Taiji, or Tai Chi (See what we did there? Made a nice little circle).

So I bring this up in an attempt to offer, once and for all, my solution to what is known in my class as, “THE HAT QUESTION.” Shifu has told us, “You must protect your health, and so you must keep your body warm in the winter.” He has also said, “Don’t wear hats during training.” So the question is this: do we or do we not wear hats to protect our health in training? And I think the answer is Taiji. Taiji the philosophy, not Taiji the physical practice — although I guess exercise helps stay warm too 🙂

If we imagine the weather as our push-hands partner, I think it becomes clear. When we are at rest, say, in our room, we are in a yielding, receptive state. The weather, cold and harsh, pushes against us. Bundling up is the passive response to cold weather, so we must bundle up. However, to maintain balance, we can’t be passive all the time, sometimes we must stoke the body’s internal fires and push back against the cold. When this happens, we don’t need or want a hat —  it is a crutch that limits us and a blockage to the natural path of the body heat rising from our center.

The answer is that there is no single answer for every situation, hat or no hat. We must match our head covering to the weather and our own state of yielding or surging. Right now, are you more yin or more yang? But since Shifu is Shifu, and he expects us be fired up for training, we should be pushing against the weather during training and not wearing a hat. So no hat.

It’s funny to be writing about bundling up when it is just August and I am stewing in my own sweat every moment of every day. But the principle of trying to match my body and behavior to the circumstances still applies if I am trying to figure out if I should be strolling in a blessedly cool afternoon rain shower, or running for cover.

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Economics of Qi

IMG_3588Ok, so my knowledge of qi is still fairly rudimentary, and my knowledge about money is even worse, but I’ve been thinking and observing a bit and thought this was clever.

Have you ever noticed the guy with the fancy car but no money for rent? Or the kid with $100 shoes but no lunch money? It sometimes seems like the people with the least money to spend are sometimes the most ostentatious with it. I think I understand this feeling: sometimes spending money feels like having money, and when you’ve been without long enough, that feeling is impossible to resist. Looking at people’s behavior, I think qi is very much the same. If after a hard week at work you feel drained of vitality, many people’s solution is to stay out late Friday and Saturday night, sleep little, drink too much, spend their body’s energy excessively. Because spending that energy feels like having energy — spending that life force feels like being alive. But this behavior ensures that you never actually have any energy to spare, and you end up burning up the body’s vital reserves instead. Monday morning you are worse off than Friday.

We’ve all heard, “Sometimes you have to spend money to make money.” This certainly seems true, and successful businessmen do seem to spend a lot. But obviously they spend their money on improving their ability to earn money — investing back into their business. What I do training kungfu is nothing if not a similar treatment of qi. We train day in and day out, and spend most of the week completely physically exhausted. But the energy we spend, we spend on improving our bodies and our health, so that in the end we are able to make more energy than we spent to get it. Our bodies get richer and richer — recover faster, heal faster, digest food better, sleep better. One notices that being lazy doesn’t really give you more energy — you have to spend qi to make qi.

This last point I can only speculate on from watching masters of banking and kungfu, but there seems to be a parallel here as well. Banks seem to spin money out of thin air, and Wall street investment seems to make something out of nothing. And watching my kungfu elders, this also seems to be the case: if one is adept enough, the qi seems to appear out of nowhere.

I am not sure that there is anything particularly profound to be learned by comparing these two fairly abstract concepts of value and energy, except that maybe we should be very clear about how and where we spend, so that there is always more coming in to replace it. And we must be honest with ourselves about the nature of our expenditures, and know the difference between indulgence and investment.