An Hour a Day

The other day, I got all excited about turning for around forty minutes and then found an e-mail in my box reminding me of the importance of "an hour a day." That just sounds ridiculous, I thought, and I kind of got bummed out about my thirty-eight minutes of effort that I had just completed, something I'm usually pretty happy with. Then, to make me feel worse, after a long, effective applications session in which I cooked up a nice little escape from "the clench" (one a BJJ black belt thought was novel enough and interesting enough to make me teach to him when he saw me working out the kinks with it), life happened with a big ol' delicious hamburger, and turning did not.

Today, I got up with a varied schedule and managed to do a fair number of each of a couple of forms, emphasizing in my mind's eye various ways the techniques could be applied, and then ran through the three basic chopping palm strikes with plenty of power for enough time to make me feel like I had done something. Though I decided that for the rest of the summer, at the least, I think I'll be picking a palm and tearing up the basic strikes therein each day, I still hadn't turned as sunset began.

Sucking it up and avoiding the mud-pit my circle became after a heavy rain last night and three heavy rains this morning, along with the high likelihood of yet another heavy rain this evening (which came and has gone), I turned inside tonight, which normally I don't care for much (but it beats the driveway, hands-down). It wasn't completely inside, in the usual sense. Sure, there was a roof over my head, four walls around me, and a concrete floor under my feet, but one of those walls has essentially open windows all the time. Therefore, the conditions in that room match the conditions outside save precipitation and with a mite less wind (though with the doors into the room opened up and other windows open, it does have some airflow). It's nice to turn in, though a bit small. I got started, thinking I should turn for an hour at the least, and then I scared myself into actually doing it: sixty-one minutes, forty-eight seconds.


The way I scared myself was by thinking of another moving work I read about someone on another internal path. That character was set the task of showing up at his teacher's house every morning very early (dawnish), cleaning the house his teacher purposefully messed up just so it could be cleaned, and then would be told "stand in horse stance until I get back." The admonishment "if you don't, I'll know, and you need not come back here again" was added. The teacher would then leave for hours at a time, four or maybe six, and the student was left to suffer. When standing in mabu alone wasn't difficult enough, he'd be told to hold a bucket full of water while he stood. This went on for months and months. What I did tonight was remember that He Jinbao is 1) Chinese, 2) a high-level teacher, 3) of the old school, and 4) too busy and too good to fool with undedicated students. I imagined him telling me, "Turn an hour a day every day or you can't do bagua with us any more. If you don't, I'll know."

The hour was surprisingly easier than I expected. That's probably 99.99% to do with the state of mind I put myself in, 0.005% with the preparation I've given my body, and 0.005% with sheer gritty determination. Hopefully the same trick will work tomorrow!