Yesterday was a very strange day.

Saturday had been unfolding with the quiet predictability of a metronome — four friends, a local café, coffee and easy conversation — until grief arrived without warning, the way it always does.

A phone call. A few seconds. And then a strong man's world shattered in front of us.

His sister was gone. The raw pain was instant and uncontrollable — something animal, something that couldn't be reasoned with or held back, surviving now on nothing but the thin thread of hope that the news might somehow mean something different than it did. It didn't. It never does.

"I don't see me in your eyes. Only her."

What a strange day it has been.

Practice was practice — and good practice at that. After yesterday's difficulty, something simply clicked today, the way things occasionally do without warning or explanation. The new form settled into place with a naturalness that felt almost unreasonable given how distant it had seemed just twenty-four hours before.

The difference was as stark as night and day, and the only thing that had actually changed was that my head felt like it was back on my shoulders. There was a calmness in the motion. What had felt unreachable yesterday now felt familiar, almost obvious — as though it had been waiting patiently for me to stop getting in the way.

To call today just a little uncomfortable would be the understatement of the year.

Nothing landed. Learning Tai Chi — which I normally find genuinely enjoyable — felt like trying to work without my memory switched on, which is not an ideal approach to a form as intricate as the 108. The body was present. Everything else had apparently decided not to show up.

Lunchtime couldn't come fast enough, until I remembered it meant another visit to the TCM doctor — and more needles in the bum than I care to count or dwell upon.

I tried to reset during a short rest. Tried to let the morning go, close the door on it, begin again. But by the time I returned to the courtyard for the afternoon session, nothing had changed. Brain still absent. Arms and feet still refusing to communicate with each other or with me.

Wednesday arrived with a dull ache in the lower back and a sharp complaint from the left hip — the body presenting its invoice, as it occasionally does, without much ceremony.

A lunchtime visit to the TCM doctor. Ten needles in the lower spine, four in the bum, two in the calf, and then the electrodes added, presumably because the needles alone felt insufficiently eventful. Just another Wednesday. Apparently this is simply the reality of being a long-term student at a Kung Fu school in China.

With the body under negotiation, training was kept to what I would generously call light duties. Tai Chi was the order of the day — practising, learning new movements, and then practising again. The new form is coming together in that quiet, incremental way that's easy to miss if you're looking for the wrong kind of progress. My coach noted that things looked tight, and he wasn't wrong. But I enjoyed every step regardless — every stance, every position, even the uncomfortable ones. Perhaps especially those.

For the first time in weeks, I closed my eyes and sleep found me without a fight. I'm not entirely sure why, but I suspect it has something to do with beginning Tai Chi 108.

After more than a year of practicing TaiChi 28 and the 13, this new form arrives feeling strangely familiar — and yet, as always, completely different. Many of the movements are ones I know. But as today made clear, many others will take time. Real time. The unhurried, unglamorous kind.

Traffic pours through the school doors like a tide hitting the shoreline — relentless, unstoppable, and for me, mostly indifferent. So many people. So many stories. All unique, yet all somehow similar.

The truth is, you stop noticing after a while. Stop really listening. And then, quietly, you stop caring in the way you once did. A silent rhythm maintains the status quo — the planet spins, the clock ticks, and very little seems to change. Until someone walks through the door and something in you recognises them instantly. Not their face necessarily, but something older than that — the feeling of shared time, shared experience, shared life.

I have only felt this a handful of times. But rare as these moments are, they linger in the heart like unfinished songs — music still searching for its lyrics, the quiet promise of something that never quite found the light.

The hellos are easy. They cost almost nothing. It's the goodbyes that take their toll, leaving marks that will never be shown to anyone.

Sundays have slowly become the day I love the most. The only day with nowhere to be and nothing to do — a rare gift in a world that rarely stops asking.

I moved slowly beneath the warmth of a winter sun that seemed to revitalise my quieter self, step by step, as time passed unhurried and undemanding. There was something in that unhurriedness that felt almost medicinal.

By evening, I was genuinely relaxed — the deep kind, not the kind you have to convince yourself into. A friend and I walked through the park until a beautiful old tree stopped us both without either of us suggesting it. It swayed gently in the warm breeze, indifferent and patient, and we sat beneath it and talked in the way that sometimes happens between people who haven't known each other long but have, for whatever reason, decided to be honest. Subjects surfaced that don't usually find their way into new friendships. Something about the afternoon made it feel safe enough to let what was being felt simply be expressed.

Some days are just fun, and I'm not entirely sure what to do with that when it happens.

No deep reason for it. Nothing shifted in the practice; no breakthrough arrived. I was simply alive and doing what I wanted to be doing, and somewhere in the doing of it, the day became easy in a way I hadn't planned for and probably couldn't have arranged if I'd tried.

Training was good from the start. Not extraordinary — just good. Enjoyable in that quiet, almost unremarkable way where you finish and realise you've been smiling without noticing. The energy in the school felt lighter somehow, more open. Conversations landed easily. When someone smiled, you found yourself smiling back without any particular reason to. The whole day just flowed, from the first session through to the evening, without the usual friction.

It seems to come down to the smallest things. The longer I am here, the more I feel that, and the harder it is to explain.

The detail that shifts something you thought you knew. A touch that makes you feel warm without being asked to. The silence between two people that carries more than anything either of them could have said. These moments have always existed, but they're more visible to me now in a way I can't entirely account for — as though something in the practice has made me more permeable to them.

I'm genuinely not sure whether this is a stimulant the soul reaches for, something that reminds you you're alive on every level — or whether it's something simpler than that, just a thread of attention that keeps you curious enough to show up for another day. The longer I sit with the question, the less confident I am that I have the right answer, which I've started to find more amusing than troubling.

The week starts on the floor, before the sun has crested the horizon.

It's become a ritual of sorts — the yoga mat, the quiet of the morning before anything else has claimed it, the body finding its range through slow and deliberate stretching. I look forward to it now in a way I wouldn't have predicted when I started, which I take as a sign that something has genuinely shifted rather than just been forced into habit.

Flexibility has never come easily to me, and I want to be honest about that rather than present some version where the practice has been smooth and progressive. It's work that has to be done every day, unglamorous and sometimes uncomfortable, and for a long time, it produced results so gradual they were hard to see. Over the last two months, something has changed enough that I can feel it clearly. The body is looser. More than that, there is less pain. When discomfort arises during practice, it tends to fade with the breath now rather than requiring me to push through it or work around it. That's new. That matters.

The Sunday I needed arrived today, which I hadn't fully realised I was waiting for until it was here.

Everything slowed in a way that felt welcomed rather than imposed — my mind, my movements, the pace at which one thing followed another. I became, by any reasonable measure, a world champion nap-taking machine, which surprised me a little because I don't think of myself as particularly good at stillness. My actions today would suggest otherwise.

End of the week and the tiredness is in the bones in the way that's always welcome — the deep kind, without pain, the kind that tells you something real was done. It arrives like an old friend you're always glad to see.

The morning was desk work, catching up on things that had slipped while the practice demanded priority. Then the pull toward the tree — the old one in the spot I've made a habit of, where the leaves let the light through in a way you couldn't plan for if you tried. I lay on the grass and let my mind drift lightly over the past two weeks, not examining anything too hard, just letting the recent past settle.

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.

Time has a way of making itself felt most sharply when you hold it up against someone else's experience of it, and today offered that lesson quietly through two people I care about.

Morning. The small room that has become home. Window open, the sun doing what it does. The phone on the pillow felt like a quiet suggestion and I followed it, calling a dear friend I hadn't spoken to in a while.

I lay down on the grass today and let the world come to me rather than going toward it, which felt like the right thing to do in a way I didn't need to explain to myself.

The texture of the grass against the back — something that holds without grasping, which is a quality I find myself appreciating more than I expected to. I rested my head on the bag and let the sky arrive.

The morning was spent in a way I find hard to articulate. Everything felt like effort in the wrong direction — stances unsteady, muscles locked against themselves, the body presenting something like a full invoice for the week's work. I skipped lunch and slept, which the body clearly needed, and then woke into a version of the same feeling, which was discouraging in the particular way that feeling bad after rest is discouraging.

I was close to staying in for the afternoon. The case for rest was not unreasonable.

Yesterday was heavy in a way I couldn't locate the source of — one of those days where the weight comes from somewhere unspecified, and you push through it anyway because the alternative is worse. I ended the night too tired to sleep, which is its own particular cruelty and one I've become familiar enough with to not be surprised by.

The evening salvaged itself in the courtyard.

I sat and watched the coaches train, which I do sometimes when I have nothing left of my own to give and still want to be near the practice. There's something worth studying in watching people train when nobody is performing it for anyone — the way real practice looks when the only audience is the form itself. I find it settling.

Another tough one. Notched into the soul like evidence of effort, which I suppose is what it is.

There was fun in it somewhere — there usually is, even in the harder days, if you look. The complex physical puzzles of working through a form that hasn't settled yet, the body working hard at things that don't quite cooperate, the strange satisfaction of reaching toward something that stays just slightly beyond today's grasp. That's not nothing, even when the tiredness makes it feel like nothing.

A tricky one.

Some of the movements in the new form are arriving with a kind of naturalness that I appreciate and don't want to examine too closely in case I disturb it. Others are staying just out of reach in a way that's frustrating in proportion to how close they feel. Day two of what's meant to be a month of learning, so in terms of where I should be, this is exactly right — which doesn't make it significantly easier to be here, but at least I know what it is.

The learning itself isn't hard. I'll say that plainly. Truth be told, it's kind of fun.

The practising is the other thing entirely, and I knew that going in, but there's something about actually standing at the beginning of a new form that makes you forget it temporarily. The early days of learning have a quality to them that I'm not sure I can fully describe — something like the beginning of a thing you know is going to matter, a kind of fire that the later stages of practice don't quite replicate. Everything is still possible. Nothing has become difficult yet in the way it will become difficult.