Sometimes a sword is just an umbrella
Don’t get hung up on the tool instead of the process.
When I lived in Singapore I took lessons in T’ai Chi from a local sifu who spoke no English. The language barrier wasn’t a problem because he corrected me by demonstration and physically moving my body into the right positions.
I had been learning T’ai Chi for some years before I moved to Singapore so I was also ready to learn the sword form. I found a sword locally and was eager to start.
My teacher came to my condo each Saturday morning. The condo had once been the North Korean embassy and there were rumours that the previous tenants had used the swimming pool to clean their diplomatic limousines. When they left, they had apparently also dug up the palm trees that had lined the pool and transported them back to Pyongyang.
Raining or not, sifu Cheng always carried an umbrella. Rain, when it came in Singapore, came suddenly and heavily. It never lasted long but without the huge storm drains that lined many of the main roads, there would have been floods in minutes. Sometimes the rain fell so heavily that it bounced off the roads and made it feel like you were wading through a warm bath. Sifu Cheng was well prepared, then.
What he never did was to bring a sword with him so, after we had practised the long form and then played at pushing hands for a while — and he had sent me thumping against the pillars that supported the condo above the car park — we would start with the sword form. He used his umbrella. He looked like an extra from Mary Poppins and it offended my sense of dignity. I felt he was mocking me. Sifu Cheng may have been lighter on his feet than Dick Van Dyke but it was hard to see the umbrella as a weapon.
And so my education began. It wasn’t about the weapon, of course. It was about the body holding the weapon. And the mind behind the body holding the weapon. Regardless of the object in my hand, if I couldn’t get my body to make the right moves, I wasn’t doing T’ai Chi. I certainly wasn’t doing T’ai Chi sword form; I was doing the cane dance from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
I sometimes remember my old sifu with some gratitude when I find myself getting hung up on tools for writing or making todo lists or taking notes. Anything, really, where I use not having the perfect tool as an excuse for failing to complete a task. Or even start.
There was no show of emotion at my last lesson before I left Singapore. Sifu Cheng had brought me a small red envelope with money in it every Chinese New Year but at my final lesson he simply waved and managed ‘bye bye’ and smiled. Five years he had been throwing me around the car park of my condo.
I watched him leave after that final lesson. It wasn’t raining but he raised his umbrella and used it as a shade against the sun.
