Photo by Lboogiepeace at flickr.com

I was reading an article yesterday about a guy in China who has the strongest index finger in the world. He can actually do a one finger handstand -- the photo in the story showed him doing a one handed pushup on one fingertip. Said he's trained his whole life to do that.

I'm not laughing at the guy, I've seen film of some Shaolin master who could do the one finger handstand and it was incredible to see. I'm sure it's very useful in a martial sense, but there are other ways to poke holes in people that take less time and less training. Martial arts at the weird end of the scale isn't about fighting. It takes things you learn from that and applies them to something else. In a meditation sense, the one finger practice would be really useful, but it would be about the mental discipline required and not about the finger.

You have to be a special kind of person to devote a big part of your life to something this strange--something that isn't useful in most ordinary ways. I keep getting sidetracked by ordinary things, but I always come back to this other stuff, the weird side of life. I like finding out if things work, and if I can train to do them. Usually I have some successes and then lose interest, because the physical part isn't actually what I'm trying to achieve. So I lose the physical part of it, at least partly, and I always feel bad about that. There doesn't seem to be time for everything.

I write a lot about backpacking, which is something people understand a little more easily. Lots of people won't want to do that, either, but the people who take up the Long Walk do it because it's a challenge, an adventure and an ordeal, and you get to see neat things. You can practice old skills even though you rarely actually need them, and every now and then you get far enough out in the boonies away from people and civilization and the billions of necessary modern thoughts that you find a moment of exquisite mental peace and clarity. That moment is the real reason I go on the Long Walk, and it's what I look for in the other things, too--in meditation and the martial yoga, now and then it happens. You get the challenge and the adventure and the clear thinking at home.

Follow up:

The esoteric side of it seems to keep building up, in spite of the long periods of time when all I can do is try to keep up with the ordinary world and find a way through it. Learn some of the old meditations, fit them into the normal things you do, and it keeps rolling. Might be slow, but things happen.

A couple of months ago we got into a regular routine of meditation and chi kung, but after a month it fell apart because we needed all our time just to try to make a living. Both of us felt bad, because meditation is something we want to do. Good things happen for us when we have a regular practice. It's like discovering a basic food you never knew you needed until you had a bite. You know you can do without it, but you want more.

I felt really bad about not continuing, because I was doing a half hour meditation in full lotus during our hopefully daily sessions, and after a month of agony my hips had stopped feeling like broken glass and I knew I was on the edge of getting past the physical part of it. Good stuff happens when the pain starts to fade and your mind can experience other things.

I figured I'd have to start over, when we tried again this past week. To my surprise, whatever progress I'd made I kept. No pain. I'm not sure why it happened that way, but I'm glad it did. I feel like I'm too old to have to learn the basics again. And again. And again.

Turns out my physical being was saving all the pain for something new I'm exploring, the Tai Chi weight training. I was only going to do a few minutes a day . . . . then Alice got interested, and we added the old Tai Chi Chi Kung series called Flying Tiger to it, to which I always add a bunch of movements from Yi Jin Jing, and well, we might as well do some sitting meditation, too.

If ordinary life doesn't intervene, pretty soon you're doing one finger hand stands.