Commitment
All talk about commitment is a waste of time, a waste of breath, and even a waste of mental effort. Commitment is for losers who are about to quit. The only reason people talk about commitment is because they are figuring out how to get themselves to do something they do not actually want to do. Commitment is for those things you think you “should” do.
Commitment is a mental problem that can become an emotional or physical problem if you are not careful. People commit crimes. If you are crazy the police commit you to the mental institution. Be careful when people ask for your commitment. They are probably trying to get you to do something with them, or for them, that they do not want to do. If they do not want to do it, why would you? Time to get committed.
If you are searching for commitment, getting committed, or searching for a committed partner maybe you should just completely forget about the commitment part. But, but, but, but you say won’t the entire world fall apart? The answer is (as you guessed) NO!
Instead of commitment look for passion. Find your passion, become passionate, and hang with your passionate friends and partners. When you have passion and love for a practice, a project, a place, a person, a team, commitment is irrelevant. With passion you have energy and fire to move the world.
Passion
Find your passion. Even if it is tiny. Perhaps only a small flickering flame. Treasure that flame of passion, of emotion. Wake it up and shake it up. Enliven your passion for life, for action, for engagement, and for being. Fill your life with passion and passionate people, practices, projects, and places. Then your life will be full indeed.
You may not get to decide what you are passionate about. But your nature, your spirit, your inner self knows what you are passionate about and where your passion can be found. And your inner nature is sending you hints and clues.
Please don’t tell me about your commitments and what you are committed to. Tell me about your passion. But most of all what I want to hear about is your commencement. What have you started. Have you started yet? Action and passion go together. They are best buddies.
People who are passionate are not hard to start, they are hard to stop.
People with passion don’t need, or even want a pep talks, although they will enjoy them, if the pep talk doesn’t slow them down. Passion is a decision. Passion is a switch. Turn it on, get turned on, and away you go.
Commencement
The first movement in the Tai Chi Form is called “Commencement”. Commencement is for most people the most difficult move in the entire Tai Chi form to perform. Oddly, Commencement is a simple move. In fact it is one of the simplest and easiest movements if not the easiest of all Tai Chi movements to physically perform. So how can it be so hard for everyone to perform? The most difficult part about the movement “Commencement” is that it is the first move. It begins the Tai Chi Form. If you do not do it, you have not started. To start your Tai Chi practice, you must perform it. People find lots of reasons, even excuses, not to do this “Commencement” move! If you do the first move, you will probably finish the entire form and succeed in your practice. However, if you can manage to do this one commencement movement, you will probably do them all and have a great time. If you can start, you can finish. Not started, cannot finish!
I am not too interested in all those plans that people commit themselves too, unless they are pretty humorous. (They often are!) But, tell me about what you started, about your passion, and most of all tell me about your practice today, yesterday, and last week, and I am happy to listen. Tell me about your Commencement not your Commitment.
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Those are beautiful thoughts on commitment Bill. Thank you for sharing them! – sifu
Hi Sifu,
I think the word commitment means something different to you than to me. Commitment for me is going to the end, and not the beginning. When I learned Tai Chi form from you I felt your commitment in each move. It is like when I am in meditation and find myself in dark places, recovering myself from self-forgetfulness, I am deeply committed to staying with myself and to breathing into even the most stressed spaces because I feel my life there. It is not a mental exercise. Commitment is simply describing how I am present to myself. That is what I feel in you with the Tai Chi form and that is something I feel you are teaching but not in any verbal way. Because the Tai Chi form is to be done with that sense of presence, if one can come to it, and each movement is carried to its end – if one can feel that then one can come to a place of return and release – the yang and yin of it. I feel that instruction when we are reviewing the Xingyi opening moves – I guess you are calling that commencement. And the instruction is to carry that energy throughout the form. When I did theater classes quite a while ago, one thing that was stressed was how to fully speak your words so that you carried your voice to end of the word, expressing the very of the sound of end of the word. To me, that is commitment. But there is that sense of commencement when reading plays, Shakespeare; when one starts, one brings that energy into the words and feelings of the piece. Thanks for bringing these ideas out – thought provoking.
Bill