A Curious Contract

Training started on a Sunday this week, which felt slightly out of order. Thought only, though, the body long ago stopped caring which day a routine arrives on, and seems to absorb both the ordinary and the unexpected with equal ease.

The day went into reviewing the Tai Chi Sword form, and I genuinely loved it. Weeks of steady work on this one meant only a handful of corrections needed in the first half, nothing serious, but every correction to one form has a way of quietly seeping into every other form I've learned. It still catches me off guard, this far into the journey, that it should. I've done certain movements thousands of times by now, and yet one more rep still manages to teach me something new. There's something genuinely curious in that, this whole art built on a kind of contract where the depth never runs out.

Not much else has shifted at the school. Days pass without pausing to be noticed. People arrive, leave a brief mark, and then leave a space behind them where they used to be. The rain hasn't let up. My own mood keeps rising and falling, as if riding some current I can't quite see.

The sameness of it all never escapes me. There was a time when doing the same thing twice in a row felt unbearable. Now I do the same thing a thousand times and find myself genuinely looking forward to the next thousand. Strange, how much life changes, and how much of it stays exactly the same underneath.

I can see the end of this chapter now, only a few months left here. And I can say honestly, in more ways than I can count, it's changed everything. A quiet privilege I chose for myself, one that means very little to the wider world and holds an outsized place in my own chest.

Looking back, I sometimes ask if I'd do it all again. Whether it was worth it. Whether I found whatever I came here looking for. The answers feel complicated, the way we like to make things as humans. But underneath all of it, the truth is simpler than that.

Yes.