Taiji Day 57: keep on

I’m leaving for Washington DC on a school field trip today, so I’ll be traveling for most of the day. Stay in bed for a few minutes extra shut-eye?  Or get up much earlier, and do taiji?

Taichi…

Because one can always sleep on the train.

Learning Tech Is Your Job

Our tech team at school is going through a lot of challenges right now; one staff member left partway through the year and we miss her terribly.  The other is on an extended leave of absence, and we miss her terribly.  We not only miss them for fixing our computers and network, but also because they were wonderful members of our community.  But it’s the computer and network issues I want to talk about most right now. Because of their absence, all kinds of tech problems have been cropping up around school. My colleagues have had three responses to this — how appropriate that the human response to digital difficulties is to resolve the ternary!

The first response was something like this — “we’re down one tech person anyway, already. Now we’re down two for an extended period of time… can’t we just hire a new person?”  This is sort of a nice way of saying, This isn’t my job description. That may be true.  But a lot of the things that our tech crew did for us (back in the days when we had a tech crew) were things that we could have been doing ourselves — answering kids’ questions about software during a tech lab, prepping the mobile laptop lab for a class, troubleshooting a machine, helping kids connect to their server accounts, and so on.

the result, for these (relatively few) folks, has been to back off of tech use, for the duration of the emergency. “We’re missing staff, so I’ll go back to paper methods until we have staff again.  I don’t want to be using the computer lab and risk damaging something.  And besides, it’s not my job.”  I see two different versions of this, actually.  One of them is a concern that having no tech department at all will become “the new normal”, and these teachers want to have an active tech department to help them out; they also don’t want the job of running the network to fall on them by default. Given that there are things which we, the ordinary users, shouldn’t be doing, I get this mindset, and I understand why they hang back. I even praise it — we need tech staff to do those part of the job that we can’t just learn in time to be effective at it.  The second variant of the backing-away-from-the-computer phenomenon, though, has been one more excuse to not use digital technologies.

The second option, of course, has been to dive right in anyway. These folks have sought out help from colleagues where they were unsure, or have used the mobile lab whenever they needed, or designed their projects anyway.  They’ve helped students do what they needed to do, and helped kids save their work to the server, and managed 95% of the tasks they’ve needed to by studying the technology, learning what they could in the short time we’ve been short-handed, and informing our tech department by e-mail of what they absolutely couldn’t do on their own.  It’s a can-do, “let’s figure it out” kind of mindset, and I’m proud of all my colleagues for adopting it so thoroughly

The third option, though, the one I see among so many of my colleagues, is to adopt an attitude of “I can learn this.” One of my colleagues has stepped up to learn the database system that runs our grades. Another has stepped up to help manage the mobile lab. Another has been teaching herself to use Keynote so that she can better support her students during one of their annual projects — a project she’s been running for years with tech help, but now has gamely decided to learn to do on her own.  Several other teachers have stepped up their commitment to learning to run video editing software, to better support programs all over the school.

These folks have made learning the technology a part of their job. They’re not demanding fancy training — they’re saying: “these are the tools of the next generation and my kids have to learn it… which means I have to learn it.”

Our short-handed tech staff has brought these three positions into the open, but in truth you probably see these three mindsets in your school, too.  But let me suggest to you that learning to use and understand technology is your job.  Understanding the philosophy and mindset of a digital user or programmer is part of your work as a teacher.  And if you’re not “playing” with the tools, and helping your colleagues learn them, you are disempowering yourself, and your kids, for the sake of your own pride.

Get over it. And get your hands on the keyboard today.  You’ve got learning to do.

Taiji Day 56: Do it anyway

I was up until well past midnight last night, feeling not so good.  I ate too much at a dinner, and I had stomach cramps for a while.  I woke this morning feeling like my eyes were pasted shut, and I felt dehydrated.  I wanted to get up, have some water, wait for the coffee shop to open, and sleep in until the cruddiness wore off.

I did my taiji anyway. Then I had water, and re-balanced my body. And I feel better now.

There are all kinds of things we don’t want to do. Getting up after a hard night out, and bending and stretching our bodies at quarter of six in the morning is one of them. Do it anyway. Make it a priority. Even if you feel like crud, you’ll feel better when you’re done.

Taiji day 55: close your eyes

The great chi Kung master Obi-Wan Kenobi said it best.

Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.

Today I closed my eyes as I worked through the form in the sunshine. It’s elegant. When your eyes are open, your dynamic sense of balance tells you that your body is stable and in balance. It isn’t. Your feet are working hard to keep your balance, but your head gets none of that data, or only a little bit.

The first time I did the form with my eyes closed, I was stumbling and falling all over the place. My eyes had been deceiving me. But the inner ears are not capable of that kind of deception. They cannot tell you that you are in stable, gravity-dependent balance when you are actually in dynamic, muscle-dependent balance. One cannot be replaced with the other, without noticing.

Taiji day 54: don’t wake the neighbors

I live in an old house. The floorboards creak. My upstairs neighbor is studying a foreign language and culture, and is a night owl. They’re frequently doing traditional dances (it sounds like) until late into the night. I don’t mind their sound, but I try to be conscious that their bedroom is above the room where I do taiji. Today I tried to move silently.

Abject failure. Creaking floorboards underfoot, my weight settling my feet firmly on the floor, heel to to toe, and all that. Silent? Hah! It is to laugh. Quiet, though? Sure. Quiet I can do.

It slows you down, trying to be silent. hmm, this board is about to squeak. Shift the foot this way? No. How about that way? Better. Slowness leads to carefulness and deliberateness. which leads to sore legs and tight flanks at the end of the work.

A long way to go n this lesson. But not a bad start.

Old Injury from car accident

Sometime back before fourth grade, when I’d been given permission to take short trips out of our family apartment in Manhattan, but before I could walk to school by myself, my mom gave me permission to go and play in the playground behind our building.  I had some pocket money saved up, though, and there was a toy store across the street from us and down a block.  This is on east 14th street in New York City — then, as now, not a hugely safe place for a little blond kid on his own.

In any case, I decided — rather than going to the playground — to go to the toystore.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  Maybe I wasn’t. In any case, I decided to run across the street to get my toy.  There was a little access road between my building and the main street and it was lined with parking spots (you can see the access road in this Google map). Rather than go down to the corner and cross there, I did what I always did — jaywalked at speed between two parked cars.

That’s when the car hit me.

It probably flung me about 25 feet.  It wasn’t going very fast.  I wasn’t killed; I didn’t even have a scratch.

The driver stopped instantly.  He got out of his car, and said, “my god, kid! Are you ok?”

The driver was very frightening to me.  I said, “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.” And I ran away.  I ran all the way to the toy store, bought whatever thing it was that I wanted, and came home by a slightly different route.  The man was gone.  Thank goodness.

Mom said to me, “you’re late.  What were you doing?”  I told her I’d been hit by a car, and flung about 25 feet, and she told me that was a wonderful story, but obviously not true, since I was physically fine, and completely uninjured without a scratch on me, and so calm about it too.  She asked why I hadn’t talked to the driver, and I said, “he was a stranger and scary, and I ran away.  Of course. That’s what you’ve told me I should do.”

Mom and I have talked about this incident a couple of times, and she’s certain that a) it didn’t happen, or at least b) it didn’t happen the way I remember it.  She may be right.  The stranger who hit me with his car was never available to explain things to me, and I’ve been unavailable.

This morning, I woke with a start to a pain in my hip, at about 4:00 am, and a very clear memory of this car injury — which a professional physical therapist confirmed was real but difficult to reach about four years ago. Whether the event happened or not is immaterial.  The pain was there, and the memory of how it happened.

I did some chi kung and some reiki, and the pain passed.  Sort of.  It’s still there, nagging at my hip, saying, “I’m here.  You remember why.  Do the work to fix me.”

So I’ve begun doing the work to fix it.  To fix me.  So it begins.

Taiji Day 53: Heel to toe

My taiji instructor, back in the late ’90s, said that one should always put one’s foot down heel to toe when doing the form.  The reason is that there might be something sharp on the ground, or the surface might be uneven. Thus, he said, test the surface.  The heel goes down first in order to make contact, and give you a place to shift your weight.  Then bring the central part of your foot down, so that more contact occurs. Yet don’t commit the ball of the foot, or the toes, to the ground until you’ve found that there’s nothing sharp on the surface you’re stepping onto, and that it has enough strength to support your weight.

I practiced this today.  Nothing particular to report about it, other than that a) gravity works, and b) there aren’t any tacks on my floor. That said, there’s a place where the floorboards have separated slightly from one another, leaving a gap, that’s about four feet long.  Near the old fireplace, those two boards are still together, and they’re still matched up over by the side door.  It’s that tricky middle section where the boards are warped that you have to be careful during a turn.

We must be cautious. Floors are tricky.

Keep a Bug List

One of the habits of designers, apparently, is to keep a list of things that annoy them, or seem out of place… In other words, a list of things that could be fixed, if someone put the time and attention into fixing them.

Today during our Earth Day service project (yes, we know that Earth Day was last weekend, but it’s a moveable feast, and we moved it to today), my school divvied up its numbers, kindergarten through eighth grade, into ten teams. Each team got assigned a specific area of campus.  My group got assigned the section of roadway between the main loop on campus and the dumpsters.  It’s an interesting area.  I got to repair a retaining wall with my bare hands — a little bit of operative masonry for a normally-speculative mason like myself.  I got to rake out the leaves from an area that looks like it hasn’t been raked since the Clinton presidency, behind our dumpsters.  I got to pick up trash and make maps of the area for future analysis and gardening opportunities.  And I got to think up half a dozen projects for the future of this area:

• heliotropes, to take advantage of afternoon sun and to brighten up the west-side classrooms
• a tulip garden
• A shade garden
• a Trash-to-Food program, which composts the middle school food waste into tasty edibles.
• A “reading courtyard” beside one of the English classrooms with benches and planters (requires moving the dumpsters).
• The repair of the roadway in two places
• pouring concrete stepping stones for the campus gardens
• edging nearby gardens with stones from the four large bins of rocks behind the dumpsters.

I already have some ideas about how to solve these problems, and how to involve the design program in these efforts.  Underlying the solution, though, has to be the built-in idea that things are not quite as perfect as they could be and that I can be part of the solution.  It’s a startling shift in mindset, but it seems to come with practicing visual thinking skills.  Accordingly, let me remind you to check out the design tool I call the semigram, and its inventor, my friend Dave Gray, calls “Flows, Forms and Fields“:

Taiji Day 52: use the room

A few days ago, I chose to work the subroutines — to know each set of postures that come back to a repeated leitmotif. Today I worked them doubly: there’s that main sequence of four moves:

• roll back
• press
• push
• [Buddha's Palm] – technically part of single whip
• single whip

That keeps repeating all through the form. Its effect is to turn one around — wherever one is in the room, it aims you for the opposite wall or corner. Yet there’s an additional subtlety: as one comes out of Buddha’s palm into single whip, one can step to the inside or outside. The result is that the next sequence can be aimed to the left or to the right.

So, by adding that extra “single whip inside” or “single whip outside” one can double the length of the form, because now each sequence is repeated twice. The lungs were heaving like bellows at the end of this morning’s session. There was another curious effect, though: I used the whole room. There wasn’t a nook or cranny in the whole office that I didn’t have to step into, and I could have used even more floor space than I had.

Side effect: one of my students reports that he can see my aura, and that it’s quite wide compared with other people. Is this the taiji, or meditation, or both? I don’t exactly feel auras, but he says he wants to learn more. Hmm.

Taiji Day 51: challenge the knees

… but don’t break them.

It’s a tough balancing act.  My legs are pretty strong. They have to be, to support my weight.  But their very strength gets in the way of other things I might like to do, like running and suchlike.  The only way to make them stronger is to challenge them. And in taiji, the easiest way to challenge the leg muscles is to make them work harder, by sinking lower toward the ground.

This does several things. First, of course, it lowers one’s center of gravity.  This is excellent, because a lower center of gravity gives greater control over balance.  Second, it challenges the legs to do more, and builds up that musculature.  Third, it lowers the head, and forces more of the body to engage in the form; when the knees are bent, the leg muscles support the body’s weight, and can’t cheat the stomach muscles out of the work of tucking the tailbone.  Everything has to do its own job, and not get side-tracked by other parts of the work — so make the legs do the legs’ job, which it supporting and moving the body, and let the trunk do the trunk’s job, which is twisting and turning and breathing.  More than that, yes, I know. But it’s important to not let various body parts overcompensate for various weaknesses. Make each body part do its own part of the work.

My legs are sore this morning.