Who are those madmen? ... and subconcious development.

When I go to one of my departments for a meeting, I often bump into Peter, who bumps back with his xing yi, or more likely his ba gua. We had a nice meeting room with a bit of space today, so indulged in a bit of three-quarter speed sparring/push hands after the meeting. Hence the what-are-they-doing-mummy noises from new members of the admin team.

Regular readers will know that I'm feeling under the weather, so I deliberately wanted to keep things low key. Peter is much more practiced at his favoured styles than I am with my taiji, so it's usually a struggle for me to properly resist his attacks. And pointless to try and use strength anyway. I found that my being not "up for it" I was better defended. By not resisting (Grrrr!), but calmly moving around (OK then let's see what you do next) and keeping some sort of contact and letting the tactics flow from the form, I was able to maintain more of a viable position. Occasionally I could unsettle Peter's root (bastard keeps walking around!) or plant a token strike or kick. Calmly, as if doing something mundane yet tricky like folding an envelope in a strong wind, rather than fighting as if it were important for life or honour. At present that seems to be the way for me to keep proper attention to root and form over the natural (yet flawed) reflexes associated with someone else invading my space.

This was a great improvement on last time, six weeks ago. It's not that I've been doing masses of tactical work or push hands (though I've done a bit). It's more that the subconcious has been working away, doing its thing: processing little inputs from past lessons, putting pieces together, speeding up transitions, making new connections.

I think this is such an important component of learning, and highly underrated or disregarded by Western teachers in many fields. At the said university department, one of the agenda items has been proposal (not from any of us I should add) to shorten 10-week courses to 5 weeks, but doubling the intensity. There were allegedly some good administrative reasons for this, but the basic premise seems to rest on a false equation. The number of hours formally studying is one parameter, but the number of times the head hits the pillow during a course is another very important one.

Brains have to simmer sometime, they can't always be boiled.