The World Gets Small

Last day of the break, and I spent most of it doing very little. An hour of practice in the spring warmth, which was more enjoyed than worked. The kind of session that doesn't push anything but reminds the body it's still there.

The trip is nearly over, and I can feel the pull back to school before my mind has quite finished processing being away. Something in the body is already leaning in that direction, which I suppose means it has become home in some real sense, which is not nothing.

I've become quite boring, I notice. When I look honestly at what finds its way into my life — new things, new interests, new directions — almost all of it carries some connection to Tai Chi or Kung Fu. Everything else tends to slide past without catching. There's a part of me that wonders whether the world is getting too small, whether I'm choosing a life so deliberately narrow that it might one day become a room without windows.

And yet the narrowness is also, in a way, the point. There's something in a hidden, simple life that I couldn't have understood from the outside — a texture to it that you only encounter by actually living it. The energy that used to go into performing existence for an audience is freed up for something else, and that's not a small thing.

I miss the early days when every training session seemed to bring some seismic shift — something physical unlocking, something mental rearranging itself. Those changes don't arrive as often now. The work is quieter, more interior, harder to point to. Questions rattle around about direction, about meaning, about what all of this is actually for, and this life doesn't answer them on demand. It answers them sideways, slowly, in moments you weren't looking for.

It is a lonely trip to nowhere, and yet it is the trip I have chosen. Not knowing has become a kind of knowing for me.