A long time practitioner of yoga I felt no need to explore tai chi. But since a hip replacement my yoga habit was broken and some of the stretching exercises seemed too strenuous so I need a replacement and this was the year I decided to try tai chi. For a reasonable fee I began taking once a week classes at the nearest senior center with a young woman who clearly knows a great deal about tai chi as well as the martial arts of which it is an offspring/part (the relationship isn't entirely clear to me). I envisioned learning a slow, meditative series of movements that I would be able to do at home. I have not learned that from her. No two classes are the same, the parts do not flow into one another, I cannot make my feet work with my hands, my balance is off and sometimes I feel I've strained that somewhat cantankerous hip.
Yesterday I went to a free tai chi class at the community college which houses the Academy for Lifelong Learning in which I'm very active. This class was free, it was taught by a man who simply demonstrated, slowly, with a minimum of talk, a series of movements, many repeated several times, the kind of slow exercise I had expected. Two young women, one guy I know from the Academy and me -- in an empty room with some music on a tiny boom box and the teacher, mostly with his back to us so we could see him in a make shift mirror wall (black hanging beyond a glass window). It's what I wanted to learn. I will complete the three months I paid for at the Senior Center but then I will stop and keep going to these classes which will last through the spring semester, by which time I will have memorized the sequence and be able to do it at home. If he teaches it again next fall I will be there. I am truly not interested in Chinese martial arts, not at this age and it was never something appealing to my personality. I've found what I was looking for, I may even be able to include it in my beach walks next summer.
