No Long Form

We had a new/old student come to taiji this morning. Mike had been coming, moved to Pocatello and stopped coming, and now has apparently moved back to IF, and hence is willing to come again. At any rate, Don decided that we'd go back to the short form, today at least, but throw in a few of the long form exercises. Mostly Don was focusing on corrections for Mike, so neither Mark nor I got any major comments. However, if we'd done anything particularly egregious, Don would have noticed. So our short form hadn't suffered appreciably from learning the bits of the long form. No clue what we'll be doing next week. I would like to learn at least enough of the long form that I could figure out the rest on my own, given a list of the correct order, but that means we have to make it to at least one example of each move that isn't in the CMC form. I know the names for three such moves: needles at the bottom of the sea; fan through the back; circle fist. Needles isn't too far past where we've gotten to, but I'm not sure where the others are.

Oh, and Don seems to think that I may soon be too good for him at push-hands. Or, better than he is. I think he's a bit overly optimistic about my abilities, but it's nice to know that I'm improving. Apparently there's a phase that most serious taiji students go through, somewhere between 2 and 5 years in, where they think they know everything there is to know. It takes them another year or so to realize that they know almost nothing. Well, I've never gone through a long period like that. Every time I'd even start thinking I was getting a handle on things, someone would demonstrate for me just how much I had left to learn. So I can honestly say that I'm leagues ahead of where I started, but I see an infinite expanse still ahead of me to go. Seriously, even if, by some miracle, I get better than Don, there's still Kayo, and Bataan, and Ben Lo, and dozens or hundreds of others that I haven't met yet. And the ultimate challenge? Cheng Manch'ing, the grandmaster himself. Do I think that's possible? Eh, there's a small part of me that says, "Sure! Why not?!" There's a much larger part of me pointing and laughing and saying, "Yeah, suuuure it's possible. Wanna buy a bridge?" That feels like the right balance. Enough ego to keep me going; enough humility not to overstep myself.