A Coach for Aging

One thing we can't help noticing about the Olympics is that China has offered the world some wonderful coaches, athletes, and approaches to the integration of mind and body. Here is another reason I'm grateful to be living in Portland. Dr. Fuzhong Li is here. These are his beautifully-balanced arms, and if you'd like to see the whole man, I've posted more pictures of him here. He's a specialist in movement and aging, a Tai Chi master, a man of grace and humor who has developed a style of Tai Chi he calls "Functional Tai Chi."

He just finished a study that demonstrated the success of Tai Chi in restoring balance and mobility to people with Parkinson's. Now he's aiming to prove that the streamlined sequence of Tai Chi movements which he formulated can help any of us to preserve our mobility as we age. I'm one of the youngest people in the study; our class is weighted toward people in their eighties, and a couple are in their nineties. I enrolled because I love Tai Chi and am curious about this new form of it. I did Tai Chi and yoga for years but gradually let my practice slip (in favor of spending more sedentary hours on the computer and the couch), so I figured it might help. And I think it is helping. Slowly.

We seldom see Dr. Li, as our teacher is someone he has trained, but today he taught the class I'm attending, and he talked about his theories and goals and then demonstrated how we will be executing the movements by the end of this year. Watching him, I was moved to tears. I want to move like that. I'm inspired and will stick with it.

In other Portland news, those of you who were following the Alicia Jackson foreclosure/liberation story may be interested in new developments yesterday and today. Unfortunately I've been having too many headaches to continue working with the Occupier, but I'm happy to see my much-younger colleagues surging toward social justice while I move slowly and deliberately in an effort to regain balance. Part of finding balance is knowing when to back off, let go, and hand the work to the next generation.