Silence is Harder Than it Sounds

After two days of genuine effort, I can officially confirm that maintaining silence in this school is somewhere between very difficult and essentially impossible.

And to be fair to the school — that is not the problem. The problem is me.

I am not entirely sure what it is. Perhaps I am simply accustomed to talking, to the rhythm of exchange, to the way conversation makes the hours feel inhabited. Perhaps it justifies something — my presence, my existence, the sense that I am here and that here is real. Perhaps underneath all of it, there is something simpler and less flattering: a quiet fear of what a world without noise might actually ask of me. Perhaps it is a little of all of these things pressed together, which is probably closer to the truth than any single answer.

And that is alright. It is allowed to be complicated.

Like anything genuinely new, it will take time to get the hang of — and considerably longer to become any good at. So for now I will keep trying. Keep making space. Keep letting the feelings fall into whatever room becomes available, without demanding they arrive on any particular schedule.

Training today was good but taxing. Summer has well and truly arrived, and it did not ease its way in — it simply appeared, fully committed, turning every session into something practised in a sea of sweat. With each passing year, I find the heat takes a slightly greater toll than it did the one before, which I note without complaint and without particular surprise. The body keeps its own honest accounting.

The Tai Chi is progressing. Within a couple of weeks, I think I will be ready to begin the last new form before entering six months of revision — a threshold I find myself approaching with something that feels like quiet readiness.

All in all, things are well. Could they be better? Of course. But that question has long since stopped troubling me the way it once did. I have accepted, without resignation and without drama, who I am and where I am. I work every day to grow — and if improvement arrives, I will be grateful. And if it doesn't, I will be grateful for that too.

Both outcomes point in the same direction. That, I think, is what acceptance actually looks like when it's real.