Test your might.

Standing in an uncomfortable kung-fu posture at Tai Chi last night, I realised that I've now been studying it for more than six years which is the longest I've spent on any martial art. Then I realised something else, perhaps even more pertinent. My Goodness, I thought. I'm bored out of my tiny mind.
Not the most efficatious frame of mind for learning an ancient meditative martial art, perhaps, but once you're in that frame of mind it's difficult to get out of it. Admittedly I seemed to spend a lot of yesterday feeling particularly sorry for myself for no apparent reason so it probably wasn't just the Tai Chi that was to blame, but it did strike me that I don't feel like I've learned anything new in months. As I ran through Pung-Liu-Ji-An with an air of almost physical contempt I realised that I know those moves so well and I know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing that I wasn't even trying any more and given that trying to be perfect every time is rather the point of Tai Chi, that's not really good, is it?
Part of the problem is that the class I go to is run in a popular gym, and so we get a lot of beginners coming and going which means we tend to go over the same basic stuff again and again and again with only about ten or twenty minutes of more advanced stuff at the end - which doesn't tend to be enough to really learn all that much. I wouldn't say I'm that good at Tai Chi - it's done wonders for my balance and posture, and made me a much better dancer*, but I'm not exactly Jet Li - but I'm thinking that I'm not going to get much better the way I'm going. I either need to change what I'm doing in order to learn more, realise I'm not going to improve and carry on solely due to the exercise benefits, or do something else entirely.

What do you think?


[Poll #1077180]

^{*I think so, anyway.}