My ideal is to know the forms I study well enough to be able to perform any of them if asked, no preparation and no hesitation. Yeah, that and being able to actually use the applications in appropriate circumstances.
I found out how far I was from that goal on Sunday. Very nice practice, four hours of nothing but Six Harmonies Praying Mantis Fist – review of the familiar and a plunge into a new form, shuang feng (双封). Good review, good consolidation.
Then somewhere near the end of the day, someone asked about a motion from the horse form, 马形, from xing yi quan. I started…and stopped, unsure of a couple motions. A bit earlier, I had whipped out the swallow form (燕形) on demand and was glad I had been reviewing that lately. But the horse…the horse…
So I got out my notes on paper, walked through the form once and got it. Satisfying in one sense, that it came back automatically. And very dissatisfying in another sense – it was obviously nowhere near second nature. Working on the new stuff is always fun, but it is time to go back and double-check everything.
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