Glad I’ve gone back to reading the new York Times more frequently.  They sometimes get slagged for being left-of-center, but wot the heck, a class act is a class act whether or not it resonates with your own personal style.  You should see what passes for a newspaper where I live.  But they too once had a lot of class and substance.  Time changes all things here on Earth… sometimes not for the better.

Speaking of change, I noted this article that discusses a change we hope to forestall: the — for lack of a nicer term — degradation of our mental faculties as we enter into the later stages of life….

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/technology/03brain.html?ex=1367553600&en=429f42c57b8364b5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

There is some buzz on this topic currently regarding mental exercise; the “use it or lose it” school of thought.  Seems like a good thing to pursue.  Most of us need to be smarter, cleverer, more imaginative, more creative, better at solving problems, better at reaching good decisions, better at using emotions effectively, better at memory capacity and management, better at knowing when to quit talking… whoops, that’s me.  Actually the whole list is for me, other folks might have a somewhat different list of upgrades to the old cranium and its contents.

So my point was… that is, I needed to remember to say… oh yeah, when I started exploring taiji some years back and pretty quickly fell down the rabbit hole, I began to realize that it was less about physical kung fu and more about nonphysical kung fu.  That just came as a surprise to me.  But when I realized dimly what a complete package taiji had to offer, I knew that this was what I wanted.  Something I could use to keep improving myself on a daily basis between now and that final reunion with heaven and earth.