day 208: limited time

concepts:

• watching versus doing

lessons:

• bagua fist form

today was a bit curtailed. i'm in the process of dealing with midterms (giving them and grading them), and so things are very busy--enough so that i had to skip kyudo class this saturday evening. it's unfortunate, but i'll have to make things up over the next few weeks.

bagua fist form

the fist form today went a bit further into the form. nothing new there. but we also spent more time today going through the applications, particularly in figuring out some variations that were posed by the section we were doing today. initially, i'd thought that some of the movements were the same as earlier in the form, but Sifu noted that the applications are actually different here, and so involve a different yi (intent) and a corresponding difference in the physics.

of course, this isn't readily apparent from casual observation, which is why it's very easy to conceive of the movements in this section as being the same as those earlier in the form. but the difference become apparent when you actually do the technique (i have to note this reminds me very much of something they say in sports: there's a difference between watching a move and actually doing the move...and you can't appreciate what you watch until you can actually do).

we wrapped up a little after 1pm and went to a post-class lunch.