recurrence

I have been thinking about skipping stones.

It is the weekend, yet a piece of work is on my mind. I don’t know when I shall do it, but I don’t want Monday to happen without it. People are depending on me. It shall happen. I don’t know when though. I can’t do it yet. The uncertainty causes me to fixate.

I want to learn to drop it, to move to it when I need to. After the bounces to deal with ahead of that one. One bounce at a time.

This metaphor arose from a blog post I read about Bujinkan Ninjutsu, and the need to seamlessly change from one set of techniques to another. No single pattern of movements is likely to work, but a set of possible reactions are built in the body and mind. Something is tried, it causes a reaction, you sense the reaction. If it didn’t work, then something else needs to happen. Possibly the opposite of what the uke thought was going to happen – you’ve started something, but now something else is going on. You need to drop that initial intention and pick up another one, skipping from one to another, not stopping moving. Skipping stones.

In Ryunosuke Koike’s “How Not to Think”, I’ve learned that while we cannot choose the thoughts we have, we can choose which ones we veto. Some we can let bounce. We don’t choose them, but the others are chosen to sink. More useful thoughts can skim onwards to the next bounce.

I looked it up, the Hanzi are “打水漂” (dǎ shuǐ piāo). It means skipping stones, and also to squander, to spend but get nothing in return. Google Translate returns “in vain”. Not the positive connotation I was looking for. But perhaps useful. We set bounces in motion, but there are only going to be so many. There’s nothing wrong with bouncing, with transferal of energy into the air, skimming across the water, making contact and moving. It’s all wasted. We’re all going to die. We all set some things in motion while we’re bouncing.

Running.

If only that were true. But the legs and the breath and the rhythm and the repetition and the eventual boredom all help for that to be true.

This summer my family and I discovered surfing. We went to Biarritz, and enjoyed playing in the the waves, and being with all the surfers. We came back to South Wales, and my daughter and I did a training session at Rest Bay. We learnt how the water there works, with the current taking you from one end of the beach to the other, toward the rocks. We got the basics, both catching a wave, and just about standing, then falling off.

It’s an amazing experience. It’s a shortcut to feeling alive, the physicality of the waves cutting through the clutter of self-chatter, washing aside the preoccupations of work.

In today’s Tai Chi lesson our teacher spoke of liking to think of wuji standing training as the point where the river meets the sea. It’s all still outside, and it looks as if there’s nothing going on, but there’s a huge amount going on inside as everything sorts itself out.

I shouldn’t have been daydreaming – I should have instead been soaking my mind into my tissues, sinking, settling, finding my feet. But I realised how valuable it was that we have this internal world, available to us all the time, and that we have the methods of Tai Chi to enable this exploration. We are this internal world, and it’s huge. Even forgetting about the internal arts, the biological processes constantly underway – actually happening in there – in us – are astonishingly vast in the number of simultaneous processes and forces at work.

Yet those processes often only figure in our lives when something goes wrong, when there’s a singular niggling pain such as toothache, backache, even a sore finger, that interrupts our daily business of making lunch or hanging the washing. Health would be for that interruption to fade away again, so the body quietly gets on with its job.

This body of water is always available to us, every second of our existence, and it has the same power as the external world of crashing waves, diving seagulls and driving surf to pull us back into life.

I recently read Hai, the final story in Yan Ge’s collection “Elsewhere”. It’s a visceral depiction of the vicious politics of Confucius and his successors. Hai refers to the practice of executing someone by chopping off their flesh, and mincing them alive. Then feeding it to their father as punishment.

Both history and myself are a bit vague on the world inhabited by Confucius, Lao-Tzu and Zhuangzi. It was a time of many states warring against each other, but bound by a common, literate culture (the “Xia”). “Troubled times inspired a spirit of enquiry and a predisposition towards novel solutions” (China: A History, John Keay). People could move around the states, looking for success. Unsuccessfully, in Confucius’s case, at least in his lifetime. This was the world of “personal detachment, emotional vacuity, various physical disciplines and a back-to-nature primitivism” (ibid) that has become the grounding for various modern practices. Not least Tai Chi, which in turn becomes a grounding for how I go about my daily life 2500 years later.

Putting aside the relative modernity of many of the “traditional” martial arts, this is at least the history that’s in mind when we put ourselves through the grind of practice. And it wasn’t very peaceful. It’s fair to say the wisdom was born from traumatic times, albeit themselves looking back to a semi-mythical history, whether the earlier days of the Zhou dynasty, or before. That turmoil was politically complex and sophisticated.

What’s prompted these thoughts? At least, it’s wanting not to pretend that there were other times when these arts were easier, when life was simpler. It’s recognising that, despite the modern world of “knowledge workers”, where the brain is wrung out daily, there was probably a fair amount on most people’s minds in ancient China. And perhaps, what’s not often admitted by the arts (but is by observers), they are mostly available as a luxury to the privileged. Itinerants would surely have toured the states to make their name, to gain favour and sponsorship, from those with power. And still, time and training is costly. Access to quality training is rare. Discernment is essential. Life is messy and unforgiving.

This all boils down, for me, to recognition and reassurance – which is perhaps why we look to history in the first place – to see what continues to be true, and at the same time to clear away any fog of idealised romance.

written in May, posted on instagram, transferred over here.

This week I travelled to London and presented to a crowd of colleagues.

Talking to groups has always triggered a deep-rooted physical reaction. Nerves, sickness, utter fear. Looming for the week, then building through the day. How can I turn from seated observer to the one up there? Holding their attention, pretending to speak naturally, as if there is no difference?

It went ok. In one way, it went well. I know the theories. I’ve read Amy Cuddy’s Presence, and van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. They describe the body in these circumstances, and the negative feedback loop with the mind. But the knowledge doesn’t, in itself, help. If you’re in the mind, you’re in the mind, and you’ll spin the body and its complex systems into a soup of self-destruction.

So what did go well? I felt the nerves, in the week, when I woke, through the day. But I also noticed the arising habitual thoughts. I stepped back from them, let my mind sink into my body. Standing in the tiny hotel room, I did my stretching, then my standard 20 minutes of wuji. Then a bit of cloud hands. All morning I settled back into body tissues, keeping the gentle stretch from the top of the head that’s fundamental to tai chi. Not obsessively so – but even while speaking with people, I was clocking the way tension built up, in shoulders or sides, and letting it go.

And the talk went ok. It didn’t set the room on fire, but that’s all right – my victory was staying in myself, just about. I stayed in the room. It’s a weird sort of achievement – a subtraction – removing those layers that we add and inhabit. Leaving just a person in a room talking to other people for a bit. Which isn’t much – but at the time, it was everything.

You know that’s pointless, right? Right? Why write?

There’s no way in, to get in from the jiggery pokery of words. There’s no way out, when you’re in, to tell the others of this world what it’s about.

Only, the words play their part, they need to. Tangible example, feeling the structure, even seeing it, is what really matters. To teach, words come into the mix. I’m not teacihng, or preaching, Each to his own, so what is happening here? Maybe only writing, as an emanation, a symptom of practice. A hymn to the journey. Notes while travelling.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried reading a guidebook before visiting a city. It is very hard work. And then, when you’re there, there’s not that much time. Perhaps you find the relevant passages to digest what you’ve seen, and find new angles, as you begin to work out what’s where. And then, having been, to understand and internalise what you’ve seen.

Maybe this is that. Maybe this is not.