An Elephant in Molasses
Tai Chi is supposed to be slow and gentle. I feel like I'm sprinting to keep up and sinking at the same time. If you've ever been the one person in the room who can't make a 'simple' movement look simple, this one's for you.
A few sessions into Tai Chi now, curtains still closed, and I’ve found a new way to feel bad at something.
The instructor glides. Slow, smooth, like he’s floating through it. I try to follow and I feel like an elephant flailing in molasses — somehow moving too fast and still failing to keep up, at the same time, in the same movement. I didn’t know that combination was possible until I tried it.
Here’s what I worked out, eventually, and it made me feel slightly less stupid.
He isn’t actually moving slowly. He’s making slow look effortless. Those are two completely different skills, and I was trying to learn the second one without having the first one yet.
Watching him, it looks like one continuous action. What he’s actually doing is weight transfer, balance, arms, legs, timing and breathing, all at once, all integrated into a single smooth thing. I’m doing every one of those separately, consciously, one at a time, while he’s already three moves ahead. It’s less like copying a dance move and more like watching someone touch-type and wondering why your own fingers haven’t memorised the keyboard yet.
And slow doesn’t mean easy. If anything it’s harder. Walking, reaching, climbing stairs — my body’s got thousands of patterns for that already, running on autopilot. Slow it right down and all of that stops helping. You have to hold positions for longer, manage your balance the whole way through, and you lose the little bit of momentum that normally carries you from one position to the next without thinking about it.
The real problem, I think, is that I was trying to learn the choreography and perform it at his speed, at the same time. That’s not one task. That’s two, stacked on top of each other, and I was failing at both simultaneously and blaming myself for it.
A few things actually helped once I stopped doing that:
Forget his speed. Follow the shape instead. Pause the video. Work out which arm goes where before trying to join in. There’s no prize for keeping up.
Split it apart before you put it together. Legs and weight shift on their own for a bit. Arms on their own for a bit. Only then try joining them. Trying to learn both channels at once is exactly what was wrecking me.
Watch the middle, not the hands. I kept staring at his arms because they’re the obvious part. His torso tells you more — where the weight’s actually going, when it’s actually shifting. The arms make more sense once you’re watching the right thing.
Use the pause button like it’s free. Because it is. Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s waiting for you to catch up. The only person making this a race was me.
None of that made me good at it. It made the struggle make sense, which turned out to matter more than I expected.
I think part of why I’m doing this alone, in the front room, with the curtains shut, is that it lets me be a beginner without having to look like one in front of anyone. No one’s comparing me to a version of myself that’s five years better at this. I get to be genuinely, visibly bad at something, on purpose, with no audience, which is not a sentence I expected to write about myself.
If you’ve started something that’s supposed to be gentle and found it humbling instead, you’re not uniquely useless at it. Your body hasn’t learned the skill yet. That’s the whole situation, and it’s a solvable one, not a character flaw. The instructor’s effortlessness is the result of practice, not a requirement for starting it.
I’m still an elephant. Still in molasses. But I’ve stopped assuming that means I’m doing it wrong.