Another one of those "Mach 2" days...

My to-do list was pretty long by the time I closed my notebook last night. After this morning's inbox, I only got to reviewing the list at around 2 pm, and precious little on that list had been addressed.

Most of the items, as it turns out, had to do with phoning people. I've since put a healthy dent in that, though I'm not really sure anything was resolved.

Among other issues, the so-called "Alliance for Affordable Services" suggests I enroll in an EPO (Exclusive Provider Organization) for health insurance, which isn't going to cut it, so unless the organization has any other redeeming qualities, I'll likely withdraw by the end of the year. (Sounds ominous, but we're talking 30 days, right?)

It's effectively past business hours, so the other calls will have to wait.

Otherwise... am... falling... behind...

Hoping to make sense it of...

Sifu made some valuable observations at the end of this evening's taiji session, which had concluded with about 15 minutes of "freestyle," which in my case consists of me and my push-hands partner trying to control each others' balance.

It looks so easy when either of us (or any of the other students, including advanced students) are doing this with Sifu. Nothing flusters him and within just a few seconds, we find ourselves having to regain our balance, sometimes in response to the lightest of touches.

The more advanced students in the class were also engaged in "striking" (taiji is not just a lot of pretty, coordinated movements, dontcha know), and just how people were reacting prompted Sifu's remarks.

In sum, most of the students (I and my partner don't really count, as we haven't been doing this long enough) revert to form (i.e., not doing taiji) when confronted with, in this case, physical stress. Sifu drew the analogy here of a person trying to learn to write with his or her "other" hand. One may make progress toward ambidexterity with time, but if a need suddenly arises to scribble down some critical information, chances are one will grab a writing implement and start scribbling with one's "natural" hand.

One of the plainly cool things about taiji is that a significant part of it consists in learning how to relax, and to do so under pressure (something that Sifu maintains you don't get learning to meditate in a quiet room; you may get really good at it, but then if you encounter stress outside that room, what do you do?). Sifu also maintains that the physical skill of being able to remain relaxed—oh, and I'm still at the stage where I revert to "brute strength" almost immediately, which is about as far from relaxed as you can get—is conducive to being able to remain calm when your stressor is your environment.

While I would like to make progress on the physical side, it is this calm-in-the-face-of-stress ability that I would like to master. Just before getting ready to go to taiji, I took my blood pressure, wondering if a full day of frenetic translation, editing, formatting, phone calls, more translation, more phone calls, and watching the clock to make sure I didn't miss taiji had had an effect.

I had to ask? I took my evening meds early.

Upon returning home, I watched a rerun of NCIS: New Orleans (which is probably my current favorite of the NCIS franchise of shows). Then I went back upstairs and endeavored—as calmly as I could—to polish off some easy-peasy documents in advance of tomorrow's renewed craziness.

That said, I think I will get up just a bit earlier and spend some time planning the day (and catching up on my November-to-December bullet journal migration).

Cheers...