This is a post I’ve wanted to write for a long time; I’m grateful to the late Ms Angelou for giving me the inspiration to start out on it, and for laying the foundation, so to say, on which to build it.
When a martial arts student begins taking instruction from a teacher, he or she usually never spends much time thinking about the path that teacher took to get to where they are now. And why should they? The student came to learn, the teacher’s there to teach. The presumption is that the teacher knows what he or she is talking about; unless the teacher is such an obvious hack and a fraud that the student can see it right away, the student will learn.
Maybe it used to be the case "back in the day," that a student would spend his or her entire martial arts “career” studying under one teacher. But it hasn't been this way for a LONG time now.
I certainly didn’t.
My first teacher, back in the mid-90s, taught a sort of hybrid tai chi that was as influenced by the several "Family" styles as it was by the hapkido and other Korean arts that were his original focus. He moved away after I’d been with him about six months, and I was on my own until I ran into a civilian contractor in Iraq in 2005, who knew the Yang style and would teach it to Soldiers at our base’s basketball court on Wednesday evenings. Then it was my turn to move away – I love tai chi, but not enough to extend my tour in Iraq just to learn it from the supervisor of the crew who cleaned our base’s porta-johns, which is why he was there in the first place. There followed another ten years of practicing on my own until I took up with Rudy Pavletic of Hobart Karate and Tai Chi, and I was fortunate to study with him for two years.
But my fellow-student (and later teaching colleague) Jay did indeed spend a long time learning several martial arts from Rudy – a man who, by any rational standard, was a world-class and well-rounded martial artist, in addition to being an excellent & inspiring trainer. Jay spent several decades learning karate from him, and then went on to learn tai chi under him for more than ten years.
Eventually, Rudy retired and Jay & I, in our turn, began teaching. In 2019, about a year after we’d both begun our teaching careers, we attended a seminar conducted by the Yang family’s then-heir-apparent and current Lineage Holder, Yang Jun.
This seminar opened up a whole new world of learning and discovery for both of us. Yang Jun showed us there was more to our art than we’d ever imagined existed. Even if we only retained 10 percent. of what we were exposed to in that seminar, we both grew immensely from it.
I’ll never forget the morning we were driving to the second day of the seminar. We were near the athletic center where it took place and Jay was talking about all the time he’d spent learning tai chi with Rudy – an investment of more than ten years. He said something that struck me hard. He observed how limited Rudy’s knowledge of tai chi was, when set against everything we were learning and what was possible to be learned, and mused that the time spent with him might have been wasted.
What a thing to say! Even if there was no insult intended – and knowing Jay’s genuine affection for Rudy as a teacher and mentor, I knew there couldn't possibly be – it still felt misguided, however much it might be superficially true. The “truth” of the statement lies in the fact that Rudy had relatively little formal training in tai chi as a martial art. What training he had was supplemented by what he knew as a martial artist; and while this was without question exemplary – he got much more right than he got wrong – there’s no question that he was largely self-taught.
What Jay needed to hear is what Ms Angelou is telling us now.
We all wish for top-notch and correct instruction. Aside from the simple fact that we want to get our money’s worth, we also don’t want to put years of work into something, only to find out to our frustration that much of what we did was misguided or outright wrong. This is altogether normal.
If we look back at our lives, we discover that it almost never happens this way. No matter what part of our lives we look at, whether it be personal, professional, education, our hobbies or whatever, we usually find ourselves having to unlearn much of what we know, as we acquire more knowledge. Even if we get that top-notch instruction, the “state-of-the-art” itself evolves; new things are discovered, innovations happen, we discover new perspectives as we grow or just get older, and so on. So even when we learn from “The Best of the Best,” a fair amount of what we learned from them will get tossed out over time.
For many decades, the “Modern Pistolcraft” of the late Col. Jeff Cooper was considered to be unarguable Gospel dogma for the sorts of people who handle handguns as a condition of their employment. Cooper’s “Gunsite” school in California (and later in Arizona) is to this day the “Jedi Academy” of practical handgun shooting. But many of the things Cooper taught and everyone repeated as orthodoxy have been made obsolete. New guns, new holsters, new techniques and new perspectives have altered the landscape from Cooper’s time so much, that a lot of his instruction (the very latest of which is now 20 years old) is simply outdated. You can still learn a lot from what he had to say, but no one with any sense believes he’s still The Last Word on the Topic.
This is true with tai chi, too. When I started learning, Yang Zhenduo was the Yang family’s lineage holder. His teaching method, goals and insistence on a "worldwide standard" of instruction improved the art, and how it's taught, from where it stood relative to his predecessors. And Yang Jun, the present lineage holder, is doing the exact same thing today – improving the art and honoring its legacy at the same time. Yang Family Tai Chi looks different today than it did when Yang Zhenduo was “It.” But that’s not to say that what he did was less valuable than what we now have, or not worth studying when he was the lineage holder. Everything evolves, including our art. And both Yang Jun and his Grandfather were the best possible custodians for it in their times.
Going back to my own “tai chi journey” compared to Jay’s, I can say it was a lot easier for me to “unlearn what I knew” than it was for him, and we both agreed this was so. I learned my tai chi from a number of teachers whom I simply had a student-teacher relationship with. For his part, Jay learned everything he knew from someone he rightly considers a father-figure. Anything he learned that conflicted with what Rudy taught had to overcome the additional obstacle of genuine attachment. It would be like someone telling me that the way my mom repaired watches was wrong – whoever made such a claim would first have to overcome my affection for my mom, as well as my admiration for her achievements as a rare female watchmaker.
So where does this leave us? What are the things I want my students to take away from this?
First of all, I want them to remember what I’ve always considered my guiding principle: My job is to get my students ready for a teacher who’s better than me. I don’t want them thinking I’m The Last Word on the Topic. I know there are teachers better than me – I’m personally acquainted with many of them. It would be arrogant stupidity for me to think I was the only one my students should listen to. They should be ready to unlearn everything I’ve ever taught, when better information, more authoritative perspectives or improved methods come along. Loyalty should be secondary to advancement.
Set against this, however, is the need for the student to do the best they can with the teacher and information they have right this second. My first instructor’s tai chi, being brutally honest, was not very good. But it got me on the path, and I’m grateful to him for this. My other teachers had their own limitations, but they kept me going and, more importantly, got me better than I was before, and better than I could get on my own. The fact that my path was squiggly rather than straight, and rocky rather than smooth, is of no importance – nothing in life is truly straight-and-smooth, so why should I expect my own “tai chi journey” to be any different?
I am where I am, I get better daily, and I expect this improvement to continue, despite not knowing the future. I’m happy and grateful to be here, and it’s much better to be happy & grateful with what I have, than bitter at the lack something I could never have.
