Six months ago I had a sore left knee. It too proved to be a torn meniscus.
‘‘Ha ha,’’ I said.
‘‘No really,’ he said, ‘‘you’re too old.’
So I took up tai chi.
Twenty years ago I went to China to research a book. One of the many things that impressed me over there was the troupes of people doing tai chi in public every morning. Many of them were far too old for keyhole surgery.
The Chinese generally did their tai chi en masse. I never want to be en masse.
So I looked up tai chi on YouTube. It is remarkable how much of it there was. I was especially taken with the language. In tai chi you can part the wild horse’s mane then cross the frozen lake surrounded by enemies before stepping back to repulse the monkey.
I picked bits I liked the names of, watched them a few times on YouTube and then went to an area in front of my garage that cannot be seen from the road and practised them.
I did not find serenity. I did not see the face of God. I did find I got better at doing tai chi movements.
When I started, the golden rooster could stand on one leg for only a wobbly micro-second.
After a few weeks he could hold the pose. It felt like something to crow about. I crowed to Pete.
Pete is older than I am. He practised tai chi as a young man in the days before YouTube. I showed Pete my moves.
‘‘What do you think?’’ I said.
‘‘Very good,’’ he said in the manner of an adult passing judgement on a painting brought home by their 6-year-old.
‘‘What’s the name of the form you’re learning?’’
‘‘What’s a form?’’ I said. It turns out that a form is a prescribed sequence of tai chi moves. When Pete was a young man he learned a form that was 108 moves long.
I said I didn’t do a form. I just took bits that I liked and sort of strung them together.
Pete said ‘‘each to their own’’ in a way that made me wonder whether what I was doing was tai chi.
On YouTube I discovered the Beijing Simplified Yang Style form. It is the most popular tai chi form in the world and it consists of 24 named moves.
There were numerous videos of slim Chinese people doing it beautifully and fat Americans doing it badly. I found both enjoyable.
I set about learning the Beijing Simplified Yang Style form.
Again my method was to watch a bit on YouTube and then go out to practise it. When I’d got the hang of it after a fashion I’d add the next bit.
It was like stringing beads together. Every week the necklace got a little longer.
It took about a month to learn the sequence of 24 moves and to be able to perform them consecutively. Then it became a matter of trying to do them better.
I do the form about four times a day. When I feel the urge, or I’m stuck on my work, I get up from my desk, go to the yard, stand still, take a breath and go at it.
The sequence takes about six minutes. It is like no other form of exercise I have ever done.
It requires no special gear. It is slow. It does not make me sweat. And I do not tire of it.
Whenever I think I’m getting somewhere I go back to YouTube and watch a video entitled Master Daniel Tan Tai Chi Quan 24 Steps Yang Style.
It reminds me I have got nowhere. And I don’t mind.
Tai chi is apparently a martial art. Not for me. Tai chi is supposed to put you in touch with the life force called qi. Not for me.
I may eventually tire of it. But at present I love it. And only partly because it’s cured my knee.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
