Taiji Day 268: slow successes

Doing tai chi daily has changed my flexibility, my overall health, my mindset, my intentionality, my awareness of the world around me, and my mindfulness. To say that those things have been a long time coming, though, is an understatement. I still make mistakes. I still have days when I don’t push as hard as I could. I still eat “wrong”; whatever eating “right” means, I still don’t do that.

But I’m becoming more attuned to the life I want to live, and more attuned to the skills I’d like to develop. Am I a great artist yet? No. A great designer? No. A tai chi master. And may I ever be those things? There’s a distinct likelihood that I won’t ever be. Am I trying? Striving even? Yes. Is it enough?

Very likely.

How to have a snow day

It is sort of important to my school that we not have more snow days (since we closed for several days due to power loss in October), so even though I’m writing this on Thursday night, you all won’t read it until the weekend.  At my school, the traditional magics to induce a snow day to arrive are as follows:

1. Immediately following school, have a “lunch” of grilled cheese and tomato soup
2. Just before bed, flush ice cubes down the toilet
   1. They may be left in the bowl to melt
   2. Three seemed to be the most commonly agreed-on number
3. Wear pajamas backwards and inside-out
4. Put a spoon under your pillow

Being something of a traditionalist, I find that the spoon is highly effective, but that wearing pajamas backwards only causes me to wake up early and thrash in bed because the bed clothes feel weird.  The ice cubes areunorthodox but apparently quite effective.  Opinions seem to be dividea moong children as to whether flushing or letting e cube sit is more likely to result in a delayed opening rather than a closure.

What are your techniques?

Update: It turns out that we got snowed out anyway, so all of my efforts to keep this ‘spell’ hidden until Sunday after we were done with our event were in vain.  (Part of me thought about trying to use some techniques to cause the storm to shift out of the way, but I kind of chickened out. There’s nothing worse than doing some sort of working to cause immediate change, and getting nothing… and as a former student of mine pointed out, “the first sign of insanity is telling people you believe you can control the weather.”

First snowy non-snow day

It’s snowing a little today, but mostly it’s raining, and we have school today. It’s the first Tuesday we’ve had school in a few weeks; most of the storms have hit us mid-week. WeatherBug shows us at the southern edge of the storm, which should be over, I’m guessing, by mid-day.  The ten-day forecast shows warmer days, some rain, and only snow showers once.  So it’s possible that the worst of winter is behind us.

My friend Steve said this past weekend that we all would like Spring to be here right now, but that the latter half of winter is about preparing for the Spring that is to come.  We’ve all been so focused on getting through the winter, that a lot of us have simply been concentrating on “getting through”. Yet next week is the last week before winter vacation (we’ve almost had more days of vacation as a result of snow days than we’ll have in February break!), and it’s time to think about what sort of plans to make for the spring.

What are your plans?

Fencing Match Cancelled

Six out of six, cancelled. Do you think the universes are trying to tell me something?

is OK, though, so everything’s copacetic. He was a great director.