I felt reasonably good about my hand form and saber form, but I was most worried about sword and push hands. The first time I took push hands in 2011, it was
daunting and overwhelming, so I took a break from it until last year when I started learning it in earnest (but only under protest - it was required for level 4 ranking). To my surprise, I actually started to enjoy practicing with another opponent. However, because I hadn't been practicing it for very long, my form was still pretty rough.
(Bruce Lee and his teacher, Yip Man. Photo from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_arts.)
In October, we had to prepare for a performance at the Great Lakes Taiji
Festival at the University of Michigan in Dearborn. And because my teacher
wanted us to perform saber, we spent most of the fall working on our saber
form while the sword form pretty much got neglected.
Throughout the summer and fall, I added some private lessons
with my teacher to prepare for ranking. We spent so much time on push hands that there
wasn’t much time for sword practice. When we finally got around to looking at my
sword form a few weeks before the ranking, she made so many corrections that I wanted to cry. (Okay, I actually did cry, but it helped to release the build up of stress I'd been feeling!)
Maybe I wasn’t ready. Maybe it was a mistake to try to rank
this year. But always the nurturing (and brutally honest) tiger mom that my teacher was, she told me
that I was ready. She just wanted me to be the best that I could be. I hoped
when the day came, I would be able to deliver my best performance.
