In the early 1970s, a police car pulled up beside the park where I was practicing with a wooden sword. Someone had reported a man behaving strangely and suspected that drugs might be involved.
The officer was polite. After speaking with me, he understood that I was practicing a martial art, although it was apparently not one he recognized. He recommended that I stop practicing with the sword in the park.
Taijiquan, usually called “tai chi” in the West, was still largely unknown in America. Today, a person moving slowly through a form might attract mild curiosity. Back then, quietly practicing alone with a wooden sword could attract the police.
By the time I encountered taijiquan, I already had more than ten years of martial arts experience. I had studied karate, participated in full-contact fighting, and trained in Tienshan Pai kung-fu. I was familiar with demanding stances, martial applications, physical conditioning, rank advancement, and competition.
Taijiquan was different, although not for the reasons people sometimes assume today. It was not simply gentle exercise. My training included stances, martial principles, and applications. What it did not include were black belts to earn or tournament trophies to win. There was no obvious ladder of achievement and very little public recognition.
Much of the practice consisted of standing in a park alone or meeting quietly with one or two other people. Progress was difficult to measure and often impossible for an outside observer to see.
The Taijiquan classes were taught separately by the teacher of my Tienshan Pai sifu. I was living in Virginia, and the classes were held in Maryland, about two hours away. Each weekend I drove there for an evening class, slept in the basement of the studio, attended an early morning class, and then drove home.
Why did I do that?
After more than fifty years, I still cannot give a satisfactory answer.
There was something about taijiquan that resonated with me. Perhaps it was the quality of the movement or the different way power was expressed. Perhaps it was the absence of competition, although I do not remember consciously seeking an escape from competition. It may have been the sense that something existed beneath the visible movements that I could feel but did not yet understand.
Any explanation I offer now risks imposing the understanding of an older man upon the choices of a much younger one. At the time, I simply knew that I wanted to continue.
The attraction to Chinese things may have begun even earlier. When I was in elementary school, I found an English-Chinese dictionary in a secondhand bookstore. It cost about the same as a candy bar, which made the choice something of a sacrifice at that age. I bought the dictionary and learned how to tell my parents in Chinese that I was hungry.
I cannot explain what drew me to that dictionary any easier than I can explain what later drew me to Taijiquan. I do not regard it as destiny or evidence that my life was following some predetermined path or fate. It was merely an interest that appeared before I had a reason for it.
Some interests are like that. We recognize their importance before we understand them. The understanding, if it comes at all, may emerge only through years of attention.
Modern life encourages us to explain our goals in advance. We are expected to know what an activity will produce, how long it will take, and how success will be measured. Exercise should improve a number on a watch. Study should result in a credential. A hobby should become a business, an online identity, or at least something worth displaying.
Quiet practices rarely work that way.
Their effects accumulate gradually, often beneath the level of immediate awareness. We repeat a movement, tend a garden, prepare food, study a difficult passage, care for another person, or sit quietly for a few minutes each morning. On most days, nothing remarkable seems to happen. There may be no breakthrough and no visible evidence that we are becoming someone different.
Yet the practice continues to work on us.
Taijiquan has changed considerably in America since that police officer stopped beside the park. It is now practiced in community centers, retirement communities, martial arts schools, hospitals, and public parks. It has been presented as combat training, meditation, exercise, sport, therapy, and cultural tradition. I have watched some of those changes from close range, and my own reasons for practicing have also changed.
At different times, I trained for martial skill, competition, teaching, personal development, and health. As I have grown older, preserving movement and independence has naturally become more important. The form may look much the same from the outside, but the person practicing it does not remain the same.
That may be one of the deepest values of a lifelong practice. It does not require us to preserve the ambitions we had when we began. A worthwhile practice can mature with us. It reveals different lessons as our abilities, responsibilities, and understanding change.
This does not mean that persistence alone makes every practice valuable. Habits can become empty, and traditions should not be protected from honest questions simply because they are old. Over the years, I have become more cautious about exaggerated claims surrounding Taijiquan, qigong, and traditional Chinese health practices. Respecting a tradition does not require believing everything said in its name.
But neither should we dismiss what cannot be quickly measured or easily explained. Some forms of knowledge emerge through sustained experience. They deserve careful examination, not blind acceptance, but also not automatic rejection.
This publication is called “The Quiet Practices” because taijiquan is only one example of what I hope to explore. A quiet practice might involve movement, health, study, listening, aging, or reconsidering something we once thought we understood. Some of these reflections will come from Chinese traditions, while others will come from ordinary life.
I do not expect to offer final answers. After more than fifty years, I am still trying to understand why a young man repeatedly drove from Virginia to Maryland, slept in a studio basement, and practiced movements that almost no one around him recognized.
Perhaps the answer matters less than I once thought.
Some things first attract us for reasons we cannot name. We continue because the practice quietly becomes part of how we meet the world. Only much later do we look back and realize that while we thought we were learning the practice, the practice was also shaping us.