23. thoughtful

 I am thoughtful.

In the sense that I am full of thoughts. During the warm ups, in the middle of techniques in class, when I'm training at home, when I'm staring into the middle distance during open training, I have been really thinking about my kung fu. 

Not to say that before this year on the I Ho Chuan team I was never thinking about what I was doing, it was just a very different kind of thinking. Before my thought process was very focused on external facets of what I was doing: check you stance, watch your center is bobbing, need to rotate your wrists more, needs more rotational/downward energy, bring your guards back up, make sure your skeleton is aligned, don't leave your back foot trailing. Almost having a checklist of things I needed to be doing in order to properly/effectively execute a technique. The problem with this is for the most part I would try to keep all these things in mind, at the same time while I was doing the technique. To dip into my metaphor jar again, it was like I was trying to juggle ~17 bean bags at once, which as you can imagine took up almost all of my focus, so it's no wonder that I completely missed the person in the gorilla suit standing just off to my left. 

Now that I am getting to the point where the number of beanbags I am juggling is down to 3 or 4 instead of nearly twenty (because of what I want to call the "left hand phenomenon": what is your left hand doing? What it needs to do in order to support the right hand. (i.e. at a certain point your body unconsciously knows how it should be moving so it's not taking up active brain space) I can actually sometimes see the gorilla on my left. ("has that thing been here this whole time!?" "yes. you were too busy juggling to notice it until now.")

That's why I think I am just starting to actually think about my training (thinking about thinking, getting very meta here,) because I have gotten to the point in my training where I can start thinking about it. 

And this has been one of the most exciting times in my training in recent memory because I'll be doing a technique I've done so many times before and suddenly little lightbulbs are flicking on "wait, how should I be pivoting here? how have I been pivoting?" "that's weird, what's happening here?" "why am I moving the way that I am? and what happens if I move this way instead?" And I am very excited to apply all these new insights to the rest of my body of knowledge, but I'm even more excited by all the things I can still find out. Like I'm looking out into space with a big telescope, and sometimes I'm looking at one specific area over time, and increasing the resolution, finding finer details, making the image more and more clear, and other times I'm moving the telescope and discovering completely new things that were always there but I am just now seeing them. (last metaphor for this post I promise)

And also the presence of writing during my training is really helping to facilitate this more internal thinking in my training. Writing down questions that come up while I'm training, or trying to corral the wild hog that is my thoughts into something relatively orderly for a blog (this one seems especially unwieldly so hopefully I haven't lost the thread yet,) really engages me to think more about my training in a positive feedback loop -> do kung fu, have questions or insights about kung fu -> explore them by doing more kung fu -> find more questions etc. Also having to physically write/type out my thoughts forces me use more precise language when I am thinking about something rather than the vague half formed ideas that float around in my brain which has also been incredibly helpful. 

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