Tai chi is super duper so there....

It’s easy to complain about tai chi, (as you’ll know if you’ve been following my blog….) but despite my whinings, I feel it’s time to give this art its due. Which other art would have allowed me to explore martial questions without requiring a smart uniform and the bending of my stubborn will to that of an almighty “sensei”? I’ve never been particularly good at hierarchy. When I tried Judo at the age of thirteen, I was used merely as a test-dummy for those larger and more bellicose than myself, and I think that turned me off the martial arts for a long while.


Whilst tai chi has its pedants and its fanatics, it is an art which is growing still: there’s plenty of room for innovation, and each new generation gets to figure out anew just what tai chi means to them.

I love (and at times, hate) the fact that tai chi to most people just looks like some nutty hippy dance-thing, and that people find it ridiculous, because it means I know something they don’t about the effectiveness, precision and intent of the art. No-one is likely to say “You do tai chi: reckon you’re a bit tough then?”…and that’s the great thing, you don’t have to think of yourself as tough. You can just be, as Ian calls it, “the grey man”, and melt into the martial background. I love that the teachers who brought tai chi within my reach were and are hardy and earthy, real people: you’ll find no ethereal snake-oil merchants in our lineage. We’re not training to be killers; but neither are we training to be saints.

I like to play, and tai chi gives me, a thirty one year-old man, the excuse to play for hours every week, to mess about with swords, spears, body mechanics and wildly imagined scenarios of every kind. It’s a game, it’s a craft and it’s an art. It is driven by the highest aspirations, yet is completely everyday and ordinary. There are many worse ways to spend your time, that’s for sure.

Hurrah then, for tai chi chuan.



Next time: back to the customary bemoaning and beefing...