malvasia bianca

It’s been about six months since I gave notice at my previous job, with an explicit plan to not get another job in the short term, and it feels like it’s time for me to give an update on how that’s been going. (Especially since that part of my plan at the time was to definitely not think about another job for at least six months, but to re-evaluate once I’d reached that point.)

In that post, I came up with an ordered list of six things to potentially work on, with a tentative cut-off after third place. And that’s been going surprisingly well: I have indeed been spending time on those three items, I feel good about that choice, and the next three items would still be the next three items in some order if I were to make the list again today. (In particular, I am thinking about spending more time reading, number 5 on the prior list.) So I’m happy with that, and the economy hasn’t bombed (somewhat to my surprise; yay excessive industry spending on AI buildout, I guess?) so I haven’t yet had to seriously rethinking the financial wisdom of continuing to not work.

And, with the time that I’m spending on those three items, they’re coming into focus a little more. So I figured I’d write down a bit more about my plans / goals there.

For reference, my current weekday schedule is that I spend MWF mornings programming, TTh mornings doing Tai Chi, and afternoons doing Nei Gong. Or at least that’s what it looks like in broad strokes: I also spend time walking the dogs, nappending, doing bits of learning Japanese, etc. But that’s the basic idea.

 

For Nei Gong, I’d been going through a series of online lessons for several years now, and I’d been taking an in-person Foundations course for a little over a year. So my plan was to use the time to go deeper in that: really build up my foundations so I can get as much as possible out of that course. (It’s scheduled to last for two and a half years, from summer 2024 through the end of 2026.) And I was hoping to spend two hours a day most days doing Nei Gong.

Which I’ve mostly been doing? I said above that I spend afternoons doing Nei Gong, but the nap does eat into that, as does lunch and, honestly, more goofing off time than I’d like. So yeah, two hours is a lot less than all afternoon, but it’s still a noticeable amount of time. I’ve been keeping notes about the details of how I spend that time in my other blog; when I first started this new setup, I was making it to two hours pretty reliably and it wasn’t that surprising for me to make it closer to three hours, if I’m remembering correctly. Recently, I’ve been finding excuses more often to do less than two hours, but it’s usually not that much less unless I’m sick. I do think my nap / post-nap miscellaneous time has moved noticeably latter, which compresses things, because Liesl usually gets home (or finishes work when she’s working from home) around 6, and also Ulli expects to get fed then. But at any rate my practice has a basic framework of an hour-ish on standing stuff and an hour-ish on sitting stuff every day, which is more than I was doing before.

And my goals are getting more concrete. On the one hand, there’s a lot of foundational stuff that I want to work on: I want to improve my breathing, I want to keep on getting my back in better shape (and, FWIW, I’m still a little optimistic that both of those might help with my energy levels), I want to build up the Qi levels in my Dantian better. In terms of things that I’m hoping that will enable, I would like to get to a situation where I can reliably get the Microcosmic Orbit going: I occasionally can now, but usually Qi gets stuck going halfway up my back. (Not sure whether that’s because I don’t have enough Qi that I’m sending up or because my back; that’s why I’m working on both!)

For a while I was spending more time on Calm Abiding, and it’s still a good idea, I’m just not regularly fitting it in; and I’m occasionally spending time (usually on Sunday afternoons, when I don’t do as much Nei Gong as on weekdays but I do some) on trying to get Scholar/Martial Breathing going, but it’s not something that I’m treating as a priority either. (Honestly, maybe I should stop even trying that, and spend more time on basics on Sundays? That kind of makes sense, now that I type it out.) And making progress towards a Yi Jin Jing transformation is also a goal of the course; I don’t really have specific milestones that I’m aiming at there, but some of the exercises that I do are directly relevant towards that, so hopefully I’ll ambiently make progress.

Also, outside of my practice times, I’m trying to be more aware of when my monkey mind is taking over. Not a huge amount of progress there, but I’ll keep on chipping away.

 

I’m actually a little bit torn about my Nei Gong time. On the one hand, I’m taking it seriously, and I’m getting something out of that. But, on the other hand, I feel like I’m not making progress as quickly as I should, in some sense: I’ve being doing this increasingly seriously for over six years now, and I get the impression that there’s stuff that should be attainable in that time span that I haven’t gotten to? Not sure if it’s because of my back or my sleep problems or my age or random chance or if I’m just wrong about appropriate expectations.

And, even if I’m right that my practice looks like it might be hitting a glass ceiling, it’s not clear what I should do about that. I’m certainly getting something out of Nei Gong; am I getting enough to justify the amount of time (and money) that I’m spending on it? If not, how much time should I be spending on it?

My current answer is: I’ve got a year and a half to go on the Foundations course, and I’ve seen noticeable progress over its first year. So I’m going to continue to taking it seriously for the next year and a half; if I’m lucky, that will get me over a hump and I’ll decide that I’ll want to keep on pushing forward pretty actively. If not, then I’ll have to re-evaluate: keep on pushing, dial it back but keep it at a maintenance level, stop entirely, replace some of the time with a different practice (maybe a Buddhist meditation practice)? Not sure; I’m pretty comfortable with the idea that I should keep on going for now.

 

Next on the list is programming. I have a couple of projects that I want to do: a “gentle reminders” iPhone app and a clicker game. So far, I’ve been doing prepwork for the former, going through the 100 Days of SwiftUI lesson series; it’s quite good, I recommend it! I finished it a couple of weeks ago, and I was planning to dive right into programming (mostly me doing the programming, but I’m going to experiment with getting LLM help for some of it), but Liesl and I decided a couple of months ago to get our will in order and that spawned a bunch of follow-up tasks that I’ve been putting into that time slot instead. I think I’m most of the way through those, though, so hopefully I’ll get started programming on the reminders app for real soon. (Which I expect to take a while, especially if it goes well enough that I decide to polish it; if I don’t start the clicker game until a year from now, that’s totally fine.)

Anyways, not a lot to dig into on that front. I like programming and I’m good at it; I’m not necessarily good at coming up with ideas from scratch, I’m more used to working on other people’s ideas, but fortunately I had a couple of ideas banked up, so that’s not a problem. (And they’re bouncing around in my head even when I’m not actively working on them.) And I’m optimistic that both of them are scoped plausibly for me to make progress on one of them them even though I’m only working three mornings a week on it.

 

Tai Chi has been going surprisingly well. It’s in third place on the list, and I’m only spending two weekday mornings on it, but I’m also continuing with my regular Saturday Chen Tai Chi class (which is pretty long, it’s not surprising for me to be there for three and a half hours or more), and I spend some amount of time on Sundays on Tai Chi as well.

I’m spending a decent amount of time working on the various Chen forms that my local teacher teaches; I now feel like I can do basically all the weapons forms that he teaches at least somewhat accurately, I’ve gotten one more empty hand form and one more weapons for to where I’m trying to go deeper and refine them, and there’s another empty hand form that I’m trying to learn.

But also I’ve been spending more time on the Yang Tai Chi lessons from the same online school that I’m going through Nei Gong lessons from. I’ve got the basics of the first form that they teach down, and I’m going back through the videos of that form a second time (or a third time for the early ones) to see what I missed, given that I don’t have in person teaching to help with that. And that feels like it’s been going well.

I’ve also been going through some isolated exercises from that school: one thing I’m trying to understand is how force is generated and transmitted in that school compared to the Chen school that I’ve been going through for a decade, and I think the isolated exercises should help with that. Though, to be honest, I think that, if I were serious about that, I’d want to work in a slightly larger range of isolated exercises and do them every day; but I haven’t found the time for that. So, as it is, I’m seeing a glimpse of possibilities there but only a glimpse.

 

Though, if I’m interested in force transmission, it’s kind of weird to do that exclusively via solo work. So I should work in more push hands time; I’ve been doing push hands pretty regularly on my Saturday classes for maybe a couple of years now, though I don’t think that I’m very good at that? And every once in a while I try some of the Yang stuff with that partner; it always fails spectacularly. (Which should not be taken at all as a sign that it doesn’t work: it’s a sign that I haven’t been doing the Yang stuff for very long and that I’m not spending enough time on it. Also, it would help a lot if I had a local partner going through that course so we could work on two-person drills regularly.)

There is a local (mostly Chen) group that does push hands a few times a week, and I went to one of their meetings a couple of weeks ago. That was extremely helpful (and I really appreciate the person who spent so much time working with me there); so now I feel like yes, I was correct that I’ve got a lot to learn but also now I can see a more concrete path to make progress. (At least in the Chen direction. Which is fine, I’ve got a lot to learn there!)

So my current plan is to start attending that most Sunday mornings, and if I were to make a list of where I want to make progress in Tai Chi over the next year, that would be by far the most important item on the list. Honestly, I already know enough Chen forms; I still have work to refine them, but collecting new forms just isn’t important. I do plan to continue with the Yang work and I’m sure I’ll get a lot out of it, but I expect the lack of in-person training and practice to limit me significantly there. (There are enough Nei Gong teachers in the US associated with that school that I can get a useful amount of in-person help with my Nei Gong, but there are almost no Tai Chi teachers in the US associated with that school, unfortunately.)

 

So that’s the state of my top three items. Though there’s also one other place I’ve been spending time on that probably deserves mentioning. I’d been learning Japanese for a while, and it got a little more organized when I started doing Duolingo about a year ago. So I spend 20 or 30 minutes over breakfast doing that, a couple of days a week I spend 30 minutes or so over lunch reading a book, and there’s a Kanji writing app that I spend some time over dinner going through. And at various points in the day I review vocabulary using that memorization website I wrote years ago.

None of those individually cross the threshold of deserving comment. But, if you put it together, it’s a somewhat less trivial amount of time.

Even with that, I might not comment on it here except: my Japanese has gotten a lot better over the last three months or so? In particular, there’s one grammatical construction that Duolingo was throwing at me that finally started to click, and that’s also significantly improved the fraction of sentences in the book that I’m reading that I can parse accurately. Also, Duolingo’s LLM-driven conversations are going better, too; so two or three times a week I talk with the LLM for five minutes about some sort of random topic, and the conversation flows decently naturally? So yay, nice when things accidentally come together like that.