Change, Adapt, Grow

We get so used to doing things a certain way and caught up in our routines or comfort zones that testing times such as the one that we are experiencing can be harder to get through collectively than they need to be.

Witness those who cannot cope without life’s so called necessities and go into a fraught panic at the thought of only having 16 spare toilet rolls, or those selfish and frankly stupid people in the park today not keeping a distance and several allowing their children to climb and play, unable to change their routines.

Change is inevitable, it’s a basic principle of our existence, and it’s not always good. However without dramatic and violent change we would not even be here, so we should often be grateful for it and embrace it.

Without the usual stock of food in our fridge and cupboards this evening I cooked a simple and tasty meal from scratch, without my regular timetable of classes Karina my partner and her son Alex and I sat and had a pleasant meal together, our Skype lesson saw someone trying out Kung Fu for the first time with her son, an earlier finish than I usually have meant I had time to train outside in the coolness of the evening for an hour and then lay on the sofa reading a book.

These are all positives, they are all very pleasant, and they all came about because of an overwhelmingly hard situation that our society finds itself in, resulting in tough changes to our lifestyles.

Personally I am going to embrace the changes as much as possible, make the best of what I am given, and do my best to roll with the them and enjoy them.

Change is an opportunity. A chance to do something better, or differently, to learn about yourself and those around you. To view the world from another perspective that we don’t sometimes slow down enough to see.

You can actually practice this in your tai chi, and an exercise I did with a one-to-one client pre-lockdown is a great example…

We each had a space approximately 6meters X 4meters and we had to go through our tai chi form, not changing the movements of the hands or the body but with such restricted space, our footwork would be very much different to usual….and the exercise involved making the form look seamless, flowing, and natural. It’s a challenge!

We generally flow through our tai chi forms in the same default way and often in the same place, facing the same direction (at home and in class!). Basically in our comfort zone, also where many people live their lives!

A tremendous opportunity to learn and strengthen your knowledge and understanding is being missed if you don’t sometimes change the way you do the form, or even the direction you are facing. Change in our training, as in our life, is an opportunity to learn and improve!

Approached, thought about and practiced in the right way, training is a microcosm of life, we can extrapolate teachings out of how we train and use them to look at the bigger picture of our life.

Use your training to adapt, and grow, and embrace the changes. Both in and out of the training hall they are not always easy, but they are inevitable – and they can be a great opportunity, even the most difficult ones!