Section 2 of 4. Hurry now

The sword sweeps across and tucks, the trailing flag makes a rippling sound as the blade comes to rest along the length of my arm. I pause for a moment, extended in stance. What seems like three seconds of waiting is probably more like one... if we unconsciously keep time by heartbeats, that would explain it.


Niceties of motion - the tempo is something that takes a lot of work to learn. In the beginning, most wushu students do everything more or less at the same speed, even if they’re conscious about the need for varied timing. When you're just trying to remember the movements, it's hard to worry about too much else, but you still don't want to learn any bad habits. With more experience, most of us just start trying to do everything as fast as we can, which isn't exactly right either. The body may be a marvelous natural machine, but achieving speed is something you do after you understand body mechanics. I'm anything but an athlete... stuff like that takes me forever to learn. 10 years of training, and I know some people who've learned what I have in less than half the time. Other people take much longer... I seem to be just about in the middle.

It's natural to try, unconsciously or not, to cut corners in the movements in order to move from one motion to the next. It's counterproductive; if your center of gravity isn't in the right place, or if you haven't completed the full trajectory of the preparatory sweep, or taken the time to exhale at the right moment, you haven't built up enough energy and haven't gotten your body into the right position. Any speed you might have gained by cutting corners is outstripped; if you spend more time applying acceleration ultimately your velocity is higher. Crash courses and Cliff's Notes don't usually make PhD's or master theoreticians; sometimes, if you want something real, you really do have to put the time into it. It's strange and sad that the human psyche - or at least our social conditioning - seems to prefer convenience and expediency over substance and care. It's rather institutionalized... as a society we are addicted to speed. Once upon a time, a word processing document could take about 15 seconds to load - 10 seconds to load the processor and 5 to read the file. Nowadays, if a document doesn't flash onto the screen in less than 5 seconds, we get impatient. We are constantly feeding, and constantly inventing, around our addiction to speed.

The moment of silence transitions quietly into a coil and charge – there are four steps, accelerating gradually from a poised stance into a controlled run that culminates with a leap that fills your ears with the rush of wind. The metal rings from two flying stabs, both before and behind..

Don't get me wrong - speed's a good thing. Ultimately it means either more time, or more productivity. It's just that our craving for it is so fixated on the short term. Instant gratification. It's probably also why the retention rate in wushu is so poor - this stuff takes a long time to get good at. There's an urge to learn quickly, the faster the better - and the pressure of the clock is a real factor as well. It's hard not to feel rushed when you understand that there are few people over the age of 30 who can do this sport much at all.

It’s a choice. Not a very conscious one perhaps, but it seems we’re always racing the clock. Life is short, after all. Software’s a good example – nothing’s advanced so quickly in so short a time, but most products are replete with bugs. The people who code for NASA do things differently – since lives are on the line, they’re very professional, incredibly meticulous, and remind themselves daily that they need to have a different mindset from other corporate coders – they’re intense, they’re not young, and they wear suits to work. The faster, looser culture of the dot-com bubble may have dissipated somewhat, but I remember a time when programmers came to work toting inline skates and wearing shorts and sweatshirts, proud of their new-school hipness, eccentrically adorned cubicles, and their deconstruction of the perceived uptight, old-boys-club stodginess of stereotypical business culture. They were the rock stars of the new economy.

Version 1.0. Version 1.1. Version 1.11. Version 1.20. Version 2.0. The yearning for speed is made manifest in the rush of the software development cycle. The buglists for software products are incredible; a product may have thousands of bugs, but it gets rushed to market anyway. “We’ll fix it in the next release.” Sometimes it’s irresponsibility at work, but usually it’s not – it’s an artifact of our desire for speed. First-to-market often wins, so you can’t let your competition get ahead of you; if someone else gets to market and the consumer base gets acquainted with its product first, you lose, even if your product is better and more bug-free. It’s a lot of work to make up on a lost lead, because people like familiarity. You have to be much, much better than your competition to get them to change allegiance. Programmers cut corners because we wouldn’t have it any other way.

No, really, we wouldn’t. Gamers wait impatiently for the release of the next hot game or the next patch. Concerned shoppers want security holes plugged as quickly as possible. Antivirus software is an issue of urgency; “No, it can’t wait until after the weekend.” This industry – and our way of life, becoming more and more inextricably tied up with the Internet and the potential for instant access to the ever-growing sea of human knowledge – and instant accessibility of tangibles through the wonders of online shopping carts, UPS, and FedEx. The inconveniences along the way are dealt with on the fly and on the run, because things move fast and that’s the way we like it. I am of the last generation that will ever know about life before the Internet, back when phones still had cords and TV was the most interesting thing around.

I land and the world spins; I used to think about it, but I don’t now. My arms and sword whip in a circle and there is a moment of fear before I slide out into a forward split.

That’s a complex movement, actually. Thank goodness for myomer memory; there are so many pieces to the above movement but it only takes two or three seconds. That forward split at the end, though – that’s a killer. I started wushu at a rather late age (19, which is pretty old for wushu) and the little kids can do it just fine – it doesn’t hurt them at all and they just land in it like it’s nothing to them, but for me it’s not so easy. That’s always the way it is, though – someone’s always better, and someone’s always worse. I used to get treated like shit by most of my former classmates, but that was many years ago. They didn’t like my personality and my comparative inability at the sport was to them even more reason to dislike me. But I stayed, and I’ve given more back to the sport than any of them did. And a decade down the line, I’m still training. I can’t say the same for most of them. I’ve been honest with myself and I found my reasons for staying with it. That forward split is still hard, but a decade down the line, at least now I can do it.

You hold the split for show, but it’s also a chance to relax and catch your breath, as long as you don’t look like that’s why you stopped. Another one of those two-second pauses that feels like five. I’m back on my feet, slashes and footwork carrying me backwards and leading into a sword punch, a sword thrust, and a spin clear, the staccato rhythm of strikes a vivid contrast to the floor-clearing charge of only a few movements preceding.

Halfway through…

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