“Fundamentals are the building blocks of fun” (Mikhail Baryshnikov)
Most people who practice martial arts started as kids. Not me. I did plenty of sport in elementary school, middle school and high school, mostly to burn off a hyperactivity that nobody knew what to do with, but martial arts never made the list. Which sounds odd, considering my love for action movies and the Jean-Claude Van Damme poster on my bedroom wall. It makes perfect sense, though, if you consider the procrastination (or, as I prefer, extreme rumination) that would shape my life in the years to come.
After university I spent a couple of years doing Muay Thai. It was good for the body and, in its own way, for the head. At some point, though, I realised that what attracted me was the philosophy behind these disciplines more than the fighting. So I started thinking about Kung Fu, Wing Chun, or something like that. I didn’t know the difference between them. I was a beginner in every possible sense.
When I was twenty-six, I noticed some posters around town. A Tai Chi school, apparently a good one, was offering a free class. My reasoning was sophisticated: it’s free, it’s close to home, and I know nothing about Tai Chi. Why not?
So I went.
We spent about an hour in that room, and I can say without hesitation that it was one of the most boring experiences of my life. Slow movements. Then the slow movements again. Nobody sweating, nobody fighting, nobody even breathing hard. I walked out disappointed, with zero intention of coming back for a second class.
Still, before leaving I wanted to talk to the instructor. I found out later that he is one of the most respected Chen-style masters in Europe, but at the time he was just the guy who had made me waste an hour.
A quick note for those who don’t know: Chen, Yang, Wu, Lu, and Sun are the main Tai Chi families. Ask most people in the West, and Tai Chi is the slow, graceful practice you see in parks, which is basically the Yang style. Ask people in China, and they’ll point you toward Chenjiagou, the Chen village, where the martial roots of the practice are still very much alive.
That’s obviously a simplified picture, but it’s not that far from reality.
Anyway, I knew none of this. I just had objections.
“You don’t fight,” I said.
He agreed. (Which wasn’t entirely true, but that’s another story…)
“You don’t have belts.”
He agreed again.
“What about the forms, the different movements?”
He shrugged. “Forms are a consequence. Once you know how chi flows, there is only one correct option. So it’s a matter of learning how to do the movement. And you learn it doing it over and over.”
That was exactly my problem. The same movement, over and over.
Then he added something. “Every repetition is different“, he said. “Like the waves of the sea: all of them are the same, and all of them are different”.
I was not convinced. I said goodbye and started walking home.
But on the way back I was mumbling. Something had stuck, and it wasn’t the waves. I didn’t know it yet, but that conversation had changed my life. I went back for the second class. Then for the third. Tai Chi led me to qi gong, which is, roughly speaking, the foundation underneath Tai Chi. If Tai Chi is about using your energy, for a martial movement or simply for living well, qi gong is about cultivating that energy in the first place. You could say one spends (wisely, if all goes well) and the other saves.
Three reflections grew out of that walk home. It took me years to put them into words.
The first is a question. What if doing the right thing means doing the opposite of what I would naturally do?
We live in a society that tells you to double down on what you already are. If you’re a sprinter, become a better sprinter. If you’re a marathon runner, become a better marathon runner. Specialise, improve, repeat. The Tao says exactly the opposite: if you’re a sprinter, go and learn to run a marathon. If you’re a marathon runner, learn to sprint. You won’t succeed in Western terms, but you’ll complete yourself. So if you have a hyperactive mind, the best prescription I know is a white wall. Go and look at it. For hours. Every day. For years. Sounds brutal, even a little masochistic, but it works.
I know this is hard advice to follow, for two reasons. First, because it means choosing, every morning, the thing you would never choose: such as standing in zhan zhuang (a standing-post posture), for minutes that feel like hours, with your legs burning and your brain screaming that there are better things to do. Second, because it means accepting that you probably won’t become a top-level player. You may never win anything at all. You’ll just find out something about who you really are. And maybe learn to empathize a little more with those who are struggling just like you.
The second reflection is about repetition.
Sometimes people ask me how to get better at what they do. One of my favorite answer is what I call “the metaphor of the photographer“. Take your camera and shoot the same landscape, with the same camera and the same lens, every day for a year. Then look at how much you’ve improved.
Simple, and very annoying. But after a few hundred days the picture changes. The landscape is different. The vibes are different. Even better: You are different. You see light, shadows and colours differently. That is how you make something good, then better, then better again, then perfect. And then you discover that your idea of perfect is very different from the idea of someone who has been at it for fifty years, and that the gap is the interesting part.
The third reflection is the one I care about most. It is about learning to love constancy: the ability to do something today, do it again tomorrow, and again the day after. Even when the enthusiasm of the first day is gone. Even when nobody is watching, when no reward is coming, when you are not even sure it is worth doing.
This is what took me longest to understand: repeating is not copying.
The same action, done on different days, is never quite the same action. On day one you do it with excitement. On day two, perhaps, with effort. On day three simply because you decided to. From the outside it looks identical. It isn’t, because you aren’t.
And it is precisely in the difference between day one, day two and day three that, I believe, a huge part of the meaning of life is hidden. Not necessarily in the extraordinary event, but in what happens inside us while we apparently keep repeating ourselves. Walking, working, training, taking care of someone, taking care of yourself, loving. A step is always a step, and yet the first, the hundredth and the thousandth are never the same step. You don’t always need something new to happen in order to know that something is happening. Because sometimes what is happening is you.
So here I am. Still a beginner, in martial arts and in life. No belts, no fights, no trophies. Just the same movement, every single day, for the rest of my life.
I guess there are worse things in the world.
