Thursday, May 15, 2025

Square Form is Good "Labor"?

Classical Tai Chi Walk 
https://youtu.be/Sf8Xd68wmmE?si=YJPA7J_6xx2F8O5m
 
Classical Tai Chi Square Form
 https://youtu.be/9_9hGbClAP8?si=4yYCdWqq-BVZr5b1
 
 Dear Master Hwa, 
This letter is a 2025 update regarding your request for a dialogue on the subject where you wrote: "I have been experimenting with different scopes of teaching, which is extracting certain parts of our art that are suitable for certain segments of the population, such as the elderly."


From visiting and participating in your class in Florida, I picked up on a few "parts of the art" that can be helpful for the elderly population. It cannot be denied that one of the "parts" has to be how we can use the "Classical Tai Chi Walk."


I cannot help but think what I experienced participating in the "walking exercises"  with the huge class. I saw a variety of "gaits," some of which I believed were abnormal, but since I was participating, I could not zero in on specifics. I have to say, however, what a treasure it is to have a normal gait and not be afflicted by an abnormal gait that may even be there because of some disease. 


One of the things I like to do with our class at the University is use a long corridor (which we have access to) and watch students come and go as they walk normally up and down the hall. This method seems to give me a better handle on bridging the gap and introducing walking later.


I can't help but think that an instructor of classical tai chi can benefit from some preliminary observations of what their class is capable of or not capable of in an everyday environment instead of taking a "one size fits all" approach. As a side note, some major Universities publish documentation that dozens of abnormal gaits are associated with various disease states. 


As you say:

"Our concern is that different categories of potential students could benefit from learning our tai chi. However, different categories of incoming students have different objectives of learning as well as different capabilities of learning. One learning path can not fit all."


I must also say that writing this made me think of how good the Square Form Walk is for everyone. People walk the same way for years, for good or bad; in older people, the years become a multiplication of those movements. You have such an excellent point about the foibles of bad, mistake-ridden Form practice for years. 


Finally, “robot tai chi” is sometimes used mockingly when people see Square Form. Imagine if the word 'Robot' was replaced by the word "Labor" because that almost happened by the person who coined "Robot". I discovered something and it is from the Facebook Group “Slavic Languages”.  Hence, the Square Form might well have been referred to as "Labor Tai Chi"? :

As a word, robot is a relative newcomer to the English language. It was the brainchild of a brilliant Czech playwright, novelist and journalist named Karel Čapek (1880-1938) who introduced it in his 1920 hit play, R.U.R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots.

  In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, Karel Čapek explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures "laboři" (meaning 'workers' from Latin labor), but he did not like the word and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested "roboti".


 

 


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