Today wasn't the best. I spent what felt like the whole day hunting for change that never quite showed itself — or maybe it did, small enough to pass by unnoticed. By the time the day ended, it felt disappointing, a feeling I don't particularly want to make room for.

I know the improvement is there. I can feel its shape even when I can't see it. Looking back at where I started against where I stand now, nothing about the distance is in doubt. It's only that the further I go, the slower the movement seems to become. Some days it feels like living inside winter, aching for a summer that refuses to hurry.

Summer has kept its heat, but I somehow forgot how much rain arrives alongside it, and how little I enjoy training in it. That needs clarifying; I've never minded rain itself, never let it stop me from anything I wanted to do. The trouble here isn't desire. It's geometry.

I'm a tall man. I take up a generous share of space when I move. And when the rain comes, three hundred and fifty students all need somewhere dry to stand, which means what little indoor space exists gets divided into something far too small for what's being asked of it.

The first day back at training felt like pulling on a favourite worn pair of jeans, the kind that make you feel better the moment you're in them, before you've even done anything. The heat was heavy but beautiful, and both sessions moved without friction. Still, something in the school has shifted, and not entirely for the better.

Basics have gone back to being basic in the wrong sense of the word. I'm starting to genuinely wonder if it's worth showing up for at all. I still find something in it, but the edges that once made this practice demanding, the parts that actually built you, have quietly gone missing.

I don't know exactly why. My guess is that somewhere along the line, a few voices found it too hard, and the whole room adjusted downward to meet them. Not ideal. Not the end of the world either. I'll keep showing up for the next six months and pull whatever I can out of what's left.

The last day of the break, spent doing almost nothing, and I loved every minute of it. Training in the morning came slowly and easily, a little lazy, if I'm honest. Not that I didn't want to move. Just that other things pulled harder.

Breakfast, unhurried, knowing it would be the last of its kind for a while. A slow walk along the water that separates China from Hong Kong. And mostly, the company of someone who stopped being simply a friend some time ago without either of us quite announcing it.

A day full to the edges with not very much at all. Tomorrow that changes,  back to school, back to the grind, the final push beginning in earnest.

Some days are best spent doing the one thing you already know will make you happy. For me, that meant rising early and into Tai Chi, and it was wonderful from the first step to the last, the kind of morning that sets everything after it up to land well.

What followed turned out to be very little, in the best sense. A walk to brunch, chasing a few Western flavours I've been quietly missing. A little shopping, though everyone who knows me knows that's never been my strength. And at day's end, a walk along the boardwalk, watching the sun slip behind the thin stretch of water that separates Shenzhen from Hong Kong.

It was a genuinely peaceful moment, made only better by the company beside me.

The last day of a short trip, and it was exactly the right length for the mood I'm in, and for what still waits ahead of me.

The distance from Hong Kong to Shenzhen is short. The feeling between them is not. Hong Kong wears the old version of me — slightly on edge, weaving through crowds with their heads bowed to their phones, a city that always sends me back somewhere I've already left. There's an unsteadiness in it, a sense of ground I can't quite locate beneath my feet.

Crossing back into the mainland, something in me settles. I couldn't tell you exactly why. China simply makes sense to me, lets me lift my gaze to the horizon instead of down at my feet, lets the smile that meets it be humble instead of braced.

Another day in Hong Kong drifted by like a silk scarf on a warm breeze. I'm not entirely sure why this trip has felt so different from the others, but I suspect it has everything to do with who I've been sharing it with.

There's something about new ground shared with someone who matters that makes the whole experience settle differently — more valuable, more calm, more rewarding than the sum of what actually happened. That, and the quiet absence of a visa still hanging over my head. Waiting for nothing has its own kind of grace.

We didn't do much today. Just enough of everything to make it a day the heart will hold onto. Tomorrow, back to the mainland, back to school, for the final stretch of this chapter. Four months of intensive training, then two more in Chen Village, learning a style of Tai Chi that's always pulled at me from a distance but never let me close enough to understand it.

Travel days can be split into two kinds: the ones that grind, and the ones that open something in you. Today, mercifully short between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, was the second kind.

I've been to this city before. I like it the way you like a well-made tool, practical, efficient, everything within reach if you want it. But that's the strange part. I have access to almost anything here, and lately I want almost nothing. When desire quiets down that far, you start to wonder what it was ever chasing in the first place.

None of that stopped the day from being good. Food, the way it always seems to be in this part of the world, unhurried, shared, more ritual than meal. And in the evening, a film on a screen the size of a wall, the two of us tucked into the dark together. Simple. Complete. Early enough to feel like exactly the right amount.

Rain fell from dawn to dusk, and I let it. What might have looked, from outside, like the laziest Sunday a man ever lived was really something quieter, a whole day given over to someone I've grown close to, with nowhere to be and nothing to prove.

There's a particular thing that happens in closeness like this. A different shade of yourself steps forward — not false, just previously unnecessary, waiting for a room safe enough to exist in. I don't think the man who enjoyed today is any different from the one this year has been slowly building. He simply found a reason to show himself.

Where any of this leads, I still can't say. I've stopped needing to. Right now it's enough to be inside the journey rather than straining to see its edges.

A city can hold you without ever asking to be loved. Shenzhen doesn't move gently — steel and glass, a current that never slows for anyone, and yet here I am, two days into it, held by nothing but a friend whose presence has a way of making even the loudest place feel private.

Tomorrow I leave for Hong Kong. A visa, not a holiday — the unglamorous paperwork that keeps a life like this one standing. I've learned there's no romance in the errands. Only necessity, and the quiet discipline of doing what keeps you where you need to be.

A year has passed since I first stood at the edge of all this, uncertain whether I'd amount to anything inside it. There were entire weeks I couldn't feel the ground shifting beneath me. But distance has a way of revealing what closeness hides, I have moved. Not in one direction. In many, all at once, the way real growth tends to happen when you're too busy living it to notice.

A small knee injury brought training to an early end today, which turned out to be exactly the gift the day needed — freeing up the time to say a proper farewell to a friend.

Bap has been at the school for three months. We were never what you would call close in the conventional sense, but living in each other's pockets the way you do in a place like this, we shared a good number of happy moments together. These tended to involve something to eat, something to drink, and occasionally — as last night confirmed — a little too much to drink.

But last night felt right. Like the appropriate send-off for someone you may genuinely never see again. That thought carries a familiar weight — a small sadness that arrives at these moments without being invited and leaves without being asked to.

Two years of training Kung Fu and Tai Chi, and I still have no idea why some mornings the body wakes up sore and tight without any apparent reason. Today was one of those mornings — and the moment I dragged myself out of bed, I knew with a quiet certainty that the day ahead was going to require a different kind of effort than the one I had planned.

The temptation, on days like these, is to fight it. To push through on principle, to refuse to give ground to a body that seems to have decided, overnight and without consultation, that cooperation is no longer on the table. Two years of training have taught me, slowly and not without resistance, that this approach only ever makes things worse. You cannot force a body toward something it has no interest in. The discomfort deepens, the tension increases, and what might have been salvaged becomes something that simply has to be endured.

So instead I went straight to the thing that has never failed me on mornings like this. Tai Chi walking.

The weekend ended quietly, which was exactly what I needed from it.

It had been fun — time with friends, a short time away, easy company. But by the end it had become a little too loud for me, in the way that things sometimes do when you have grown accustomed to a different kind of life. I like time alone. I have come to love a quiet existence — one with enough space inside it to think, to consider the questions that accumulate during a challenging week of training and wait patiently for a moment of stillness to surface.

By the time Sunday's sun went down, I was genuinely glad to be back in my small room, in the quiet I have been slowly building around myself over the last eighteen months. It felt like returning to something that fits.

The fun was real. And the return was better.

The ups and downs of school life have a way of catching me off guard, no matter how long I have been living inside them. Yesterday was a classic example.

I woke up physically sore — the new exercises making themselves known in the particular way that new exercises always do, as though the body needs to register a formal complaint before it agrees to adapt. Soreness has been a companion for a few years now. It still surprises me, sometimes, how much it affects not just the body but the mood — how a tight muscle can cast a shadow over an entire morning without quite being located.

It has been busy of late — not in the good, productive way, but in the way that fills the hours with mental noise that doesn't add up to much I actually find important. Tasks that feel urgent while they are happening and reveal themselves as hollow the moment they are done.

In the grand scheme of things, this doesn't worry me greatly. I know it will pass. What I find more interesting is the way these things happen — how they don't announce themselves, don't ask permission, but simply increase their visits, quietly and consistently, until one day you look up and realise they have become a habit. The default state. The new normal that arrived without ever being chosen.

Today felt wonderful from start to finish, despite some physical discomfort that ran quietly underneath the whole of it. Nothing fundamentally changed. The issues that have been accumulating their patience in a long queue are still there, waiting for their turn. But the day felt good anyway, which is its own kind of progress.

The two issues currently at the front of that queue both trace back to the same root — strength and flexibility, which, when examined honestly, seem to be the origin of most things worth fixing in this practice.

The first is a slight shake when stepping onto the right leg, the body betraying a hesitation I can't quite locate the source of. I suspect much of it lives in the mind rather than the muscle — that somewhere between the intention and the action, a small anxiety arrives and announces itself as instability. Tension dressed as weakness. The result is a transition that should be graceful becoming something considerably less so, which is frustrating in the particular way that self-inflicted problems always are.

Monday arrived and I was ready for it — genuinely looking forward to the week beginning, which is not always the case and worth noting when it is.

The basics were basics, as they always are. The sessions were good. I practiced Tai Chi without expectation, without reaching for anything in particular, and found that the absence of agenda suited the morning well. The only thing I noticed was that relaxation still requires conscious effort — that I still have to remind myself, deliberately and repeatedly, to let go of the tension that accumulates without invitation. I hope, someday, that this becomes simply the way I move. That the reminder becomes unnecessary because the ease is already there. I suspect that day is still some distance away. But it is a good goal, and good goals don't need to be complicated to be worth pursuing.

The evening session was a different story, for reasons I cannot fully explain.

Sunday arrived and I needed it more than I had realised.

The day was spent on the quiet, necessary work of moving forward — the small, unglamorous tasks that don't announce themselves as important but accumulate into something that matters. It worked well, right up until the moment my mind drifted toward the future and the question I have been trying not to look at directly for longer than is probably wise.

How do I stay in China long term?

It turns out the answer may be considerably more complicated than I had allowed myself to believe. Which is, of course, how these things tend to work — the details that feel distant always reveal their difficulty at the moment you finally decide to look at them properly.

Today may have been the longest rest day I have experienced in two years — which is to say, it was not much of a rest day at all.

Most Saturdays I do very little, deliberately and without guilt. Today was spent looking at locations and sitting through meetings, the new business continuing its steady forward momentum. Things are going well. But somewhere in the middle of it all, I became aware that today might have been better spent alone — quietly digesting the weight of decisions made throughout the week, giving the accumulated noise somewhere to settle.

That awareness became impossible to ignore the moment I stepped inside a busy mall.

These are not places I am naturally drawn to, and I had apparently forgotten, during the long months of mountain living, just how strongly I resist them. The lighting — harsh and flat and designed, it seems, to make everything look slightly worse than it is. The noise, pitched just sharply enough to prevent real thought. The crowds moving without apparent direction or intention, a human tide that goes nowhere in particular and manages to fill every available space while doing it. I wanted to leave the moment I arrived. I wanted quiet. I wanted nature, or at least the absence of this.

Another day beneath the blazing heat of summer, and I will be honest — it has been a tough couple of weeks. I have been dragging my tired soul from session to session, moving forward because forward is the only direction available, not because it has felt easy or particularly inspired.

But the last couple of days have carried an upside, and it has made a noticeable difference.

A friend here in China, who lives near Hong Kong, and I have decided to travel together to Chen Village — to train in Chen Style Tai Chi, to experience something neither of us has experienced before, to go somewhere the practice has deep roots and see what it offers. It is a simple decision, the kind that takes only a moment to make, and it has brought me a disproportionate amount of joy. More than that — it has left me feeling genuinely excited about the future in a way that the heat and the grind had been slowly eroding. It is a good reminder of how much a single thing to look forward to can change the texture of ordinary days.