Alone in the Dark with a Practice I Love

Wednesday came and went without fanfare — just another day of hard-earned sweat in heat and humidity that have long since stopped being a surprise. And yet, despite all of that, it was a beautiful day. The kind that arrives without announcement and flows without effort, asking nothing and giving everything.

I skipped basic training in favour of forms, my focus set entirely on Tai Chi, and Tai Chi — as it always does when given the full attention it deserves — delivered.

The past few weeks have been largely consumed by the Dan Jian, a sword form that feels to me like a dance with the essence of Tai Chi itself — a magical rhythm that moves from fast, precise strikes to slower, more expansive expressions of body technique that I find genuinely difficult to resist. I enjoy it deeply. But like most fast forms, it is brief, and brief can only take you so far. That is where Tai Chi comes into its own. That is where the real depth lives.

Yesterday evening, I began with a Tai Chi walking exercise I made up myself — something that explores the full range of the practice in its simplest form. Shifting weight, expanding and contracting, rising and falling, the body moving through its natural language without complication or demand. I notice that every time I do it, something releases. The whole body softens, and an ease arrives that I have learned to welcome without questioning its source.

From there, the Tai Chi sword. I approached it with a quiet nervousness — it had been a while, and absence always carries its own uncertainty. But the moment I took the first step, I was simply inside it. Swallowed by its embrace. Everything was flowing without resistance, as though the gap hadn't existed at all.

And then the 108.

For the next forty-five minutes, I was somewhere else entirely. Not absent — more present than I usually am, but present in a way that had nothing to do with thought, effort or intention. An empty vessel moving through an isolated world. Everything else disappeared until there was only movement, pure and perfectly aligned, carrying me through each position as though the form itself knew where it was going and I was simply along for the journey.

Practice ended quietly. The lights went off, and I sat in the dark, feeling the sweat slowly sliding down my body, aware of a deep and unhurried presence — a stillness that held without urgency.

Not a lot happened tonight. And it was one of the most perfect evenings I have known.