I am back to talk more about the Double Fan Form. It’s the only form I do every day, though I did not do it for over a month after I got my three shots in one day. I was pleased to be able to pick it up again recently, though I was rusty. There are a few postures I need to refine, but as my teacher is fond of saying, it’s better to finish learning the form first and then doing the refinement. She calls it graduating, but it doesn’t feel that way to me.
She’s very generous when she says that, and she’s supportive in general of people wherever they are. It’s one thing I appreciated because I don’t do well by being loudly scolded. Well, let me rephrase that. I did well by being metaphorically flogged, but it made me feel miserable inside.
I find that because of my upbringing, I don’t do well with harsh criticism. I tend to get all bristly and snap back .I’m a porcupine with spikes all over me, and I shoot them off when I feel threatened.
It’s funny. When I was a kid, I was adamant that I didn’t get angry. I kept my emotions tamped deep down inside, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have them. I just was not allowed to show them, which meant that when I did finally express any dissatisfaction, I would explode in white hot anger.
Since my medical crisis, I have had more difficulty tempering my, well, temper. I think it’s because of the stroke I had. I’m not trying to make excuses, but it does feel out of my control. I do my best to mitigate it by clamping my mouth shut when I get heated, and I’m very good at keeping my face immobile. However, I know I have tells, even if I don’t know what they are. I know one of them because Ian told me about it. He said that when I’m absolutely done with a conversation, I cut my eyes up and to the left. Which is good to know, I guess, but it’s not as if I can stop myself from doing it.
Nor, quite frankly, do I really care to train it out of me. In the blog, Ask A Manager, there is an emphasis on not making faces in the office/on Zoom. It’s disrespectful to your coworkers, you see. There have been a few letter writers over the years who had difficulty training their faces to be neutral enough for their offices.
Now, I understand that you can’t be grimacing, scowling, or rolling your eyes at your coworkers. However, people find it creepy when you hold your face perfectly still, which is annoying as well. I mean, it feels very damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Or rather, there is a narrow range of acceptable emotions/reactions you can show in polite society.
It’s been interesting to read Ask A Manager over the last several years. It’s a good blog, but it’s very much based on what normies should do in office life. Yes, it mostly emphasizes white collar office life, but it extends to much of polite society in general.
Hm, I went off the rails again, just as I did in yesterday’s post.
Back to the Double Fan Form and Taiji in general. You know the conventional saying that you can work your anger off through exercising, and I find that to be true with Taiji. Not that I work it off, exactly, but that I feel better once I do my ‘moring’ routine. I put morninng in quotes because I have been getting up in the afternoon for most of my life.
The warmups and the Taiji hands-only forms chill me the fuck out. The weapon forms and the weight set allow me to sweat it out. It’s a good all-around exercise regime–I try not to dwell on it, but that’s what I call it in my brain. Regime, I mean. When I write about it, I call it my routine, which sounds a lot better. I’m not so kind in my mind, though, especially to myself.
I just watched the end of the Double Fan Form in the video I included above. The next posture is similar to one in the Double Saber Form, but I have the feeling it’s going to be either super-hard to teach it to myself or a snap. There will be no in-between. I watched from that point to the end of the form, and it’s pretty intense. There’s a lot of two hands moving, which is only to be expected at this point in the form. Watching this woman do it, she makes it look so easy. She has a particular comfortableness to her movements that makes her form just flow. She’s a minimalist–by this, I mean that she doesn’t do any flourishes. I like that much more than I like the showy performances.
The other women I watch are very chill, too. That makes me happy. It took me quite some time to find these three because as I said, there is no Double Fan Form in my lineage. This is the only Taiji Double Fan Form that I could find. Every other double fan form was from a different discipline. I’m not necessarily against that, but I definitely prefer something from Taiji.
I’m trying not to think about the next form I’m going to teach myself, but it’s difficult. That’s how my brain works, which is why I have a hard time finishing things. I find new ideas exciting, whereas I get bored somewhere thereafter. It’s not usually until the last third or so of whatever I’m doing.
I go hard, and then I run out of steam. In this case, it’s me being frustrated by having to stop for a month-and-a-half because of my shots. And it’s me being frustrated that it’s taken me so long to teach this form to myself. As I mentioned yesterday, I don’t do well with obstacles when I’m learning something new, and this form has been so fucking hard.
Still. I am proud of myself for persevering when I wanted to quit. Which was several times during the form. As I have said several times, this is by far the hardest form I’ve learned. SO hard. It’s also so beautiful when I manage to do portions of it correctly.
I’m done for today, but I may have one more post in me tomorrow. I will definitely write more about the Double Fan Form when I finally finish teaching it to myself.