Thinking that keeps me from Feeling

Thursday marked the end of the week — tomorrow is a day off for the Dragon Boat Festival, which the Wudang Mountains will celebrate in their own particular way, without open water or boats but with a Kung Fu family lunch that, knowing this place, will carry its own quiet ceremony.

The week was short and the weather mixed, but the Dan Jian has progressed well, and that matters more than either. Of all the sword forms I have learned, this one feels among the most expressive — serious in its intention and somehow joyful in its execution, the kind of form that ends with a smile already on the face before the final movement has fully settled. I have come to understand that this is not a small thing. Practice in a Kung Fu school is essentially life. They cannot be separated, however much the thinking mind might like to organise them into different drawers.

Even on a rest day, the body wants to move. Wants to run through the forms, wants to feel the steps, wants to stay connected to the thread of the journey rather than set it down even for a day. I have stopped questioning that impulse and started trusting it.

Looking back from where I stand now is a strange and particular experience. The change is sometimes hard to see from the inside — progress rarely announces itself clearly while it is happening. But when I look for the person I was when this all began, I find I can barely locate him. He is there somewhere, behind the distance, but he feels far away in a way that is difficult to fully articulate. Not lost. Just no longer the one holding the pen.

I am glad I was that person. Glad for everything that version of me lived through and chose and stumbled into — the experiences, the lifestyle, the particular education of having been exactly who I was. All of it brought me here. But this — what I am now, what I am becoming — is what I choose to move forward with.

And then the questions arrive, as they always do.

Will I ever reach the truth I am searching for? Is finding it even the point — or is the search itself a kind of comfortable fiction the mind constructs to make it feel like progress is being made while the real steps remain untaken? It is a question that keeps me thinking. And thinking, I am beginning to notice, is a remarkably effective way of avoiding feeling. The mind offers itself as a guide and turns out to be a distraction — sophisticated, well-intentioned, and quietly keeping me from the very thing I came here to find.

All I want is feeling. The thinking just gets in the way.

And so the wheel turns. Different phases, same experience. The same rich, frustrating, irreplaceable existence, moving through its seasons without asking permission.

I wouldn't change a turn of it.