The Lighter Side (September 1999)

1. 7:00 am — I’m lying in bed fretting over a business situation that’s upsetting me. I’m allowing myself to be yanked off center.

7:15 am — I’m getting more irritated and it bothers me that it still bothers me.

7:30 am — Got up and made tea. Sat back, put my feet up.

7:45 am — Read Justin’s article on the reciprocal character of mind and prana (chi).

7:50 am — Had an intuition to look at the cable guide and see what movies were on. I resist. No, I think to myself, I don’t want to get up, and I hardly ever watch movies in the morning. The thought was still there, go check the TV guide. The more insistent the thought, the more resistant I became.

7:55 am — Finally, I succumbed. I got up and looked at the 8:00 am movie. It was “Excess Baggage!” I laughed out loud. Then I let it go. Message Received.

P.S. I did not watch the movie.

– Sharon Sirkis

2. One of my beginning students was one day groping for the name of the “Around the Platter” movement and came up with “Wiping the Counter.”

– Mark Moloney

3. I had been explaining to an adolescent group how we need to keep the waist and hip area loose and relaxed while doing T’ai Chi Chih. One young man asked, “Are we supposed to hold our waist (or so I thought he said) during the movements?” I immediately replied, “No,” and wondered if he had heard anything I was trying to point out. He gave me a quizzical look, and then I realized we weren’t communicating clearly. I questioned, “Are you talking about the physical place here (pointing to my waist) in the body?” When he said, “No,” I knew he needed to use the bathroom! (He meant “waste!”) The whole group had a good laugh at my expense.

– Jean Katus

4. A candidate at a recent teacher training course was erroneously convinced he was keeping his back heel down when leading “Anchor Taffy”. I walked up behind him and slipped a quarter underneath his heel when he was shifting the weight forward. Due to the angle of my approach none of the candidates or auditors could tell what I was doing and I heard a couple of nervous giggles.

“Keep that back heel down,” I commented to him one more time. He too repeated his mantra: “I am!” As he shifted his weight to the side to reveal a shiny quarter, I asked, “Then how did that get under there?” He was astonished, and the group of his fellow candidates had a nice little chuckle over it.

Later, he told me that he had framed the quarter as the first income he had ever derived from T’ai Chi Chih. He then added “May I never earn another quarter in that manner.”

– Ed Altman