The Laziest Kung Fu Student in the World

I have given myself the title. I feel I've earned it.

For a couple of days now, I have done very little in the way of training — no structured practice, nothing demanding, a deliberate and almost luxurious avoidance of effort. And it came with guilt, the way it always does, that low background hum of not doing enough that sits just behind the sternum and doesn't quite go away.

But then I sat with it and thought about the year. What it actually asked of me. The tiredness that lived so deep in the body that sleep barely touched it. The accumulation of months of consistent, demanding training in conditions that were sometimes uncomfortable in ways I hadn't prepared for. When I held all of that up against a few days of quiet rest, the guilt started to seem like a habit rather than an accurate signal, and I let it pass.

I went to the cinema instead of training, and it was genuinely wonderful. Not as escape but as a different kind of nourishment — story, image, darkness, sound, the particular feeling of sitting still while something unfolds in front of you. I came out lighter than I went in, which tells me something.

Underneath all of it though, and I'll just say it plainly, there's a pull toward somewhere else. Chen Village. The birthplace of Tai Chi. I've read about it, thought about it, felt drawn toward it in a way I don't entirely understand yet. There's something there that calls to me, or at least I think it does; it's hard to be sure at this distance.

But that's a conversation that belongs somewhere further down the road. Before any of that can even be considered, I have to finish what I started in the Wudang Mountains. I owe that to the practice, and I owe it to my coach and to myself.

The school is missed. More than I expected to admit.