The Form That Makes Me Smile

A few days have gone by without anything particular catching my attention, or perhaps more accurately, without me catching theirs. Time is moving the way it does when the weather turns warmer and the season changes gear — almost invisibly, the days drifting past on a warm current.

The Kung Fu Fan form is approaching completion, which I understand by now means it is about to truly begin. That's not a paradox I find frustrating anymore.

There's something about this form I didn't anticipate when I started learning it. A lightness. Even at this early stage, even with all the roughness that early stages always carry, there's an elegance to it that surprises me when I encounter it in the middle of practice. It feels like a small and fun expression that happens, if you look more carefully at it, to be full of unexpected danger. That combination amuses me and I think it's part of what I love about it.

What I love most, though, is what it leaves on my face. This form makes me smile, and not every form does that, and not every day. When something in the practice meets something in the person practising it and the result is a smile, without any decision being made about smiling — that's worth writing down.

Last week I was offered work. The kind I used to do. The decision took no time at all. The past is history, and I remember it with mixed feelings, which is probably the right relationship to have with it. Today I choose to live in the now. Not as a philosophy I've adopted, but as an actual daily fact.

A simple life is enough. It may have always been. I was just too busy to notice it.