I discovered that practice meant giving up trying to achieve perfection. What it really gave me was a calm, quiet belly.
Many long years ago, I practiced Tai Chi Sword, and Naginata, a women’s sword-fighting art, where the sword is bound to a six-foot bamboo pole that extends the reach of the sword.
There was a famous battle in Japan in an earlier century — I can’t remember which — where all the men in a village had gone to war, and the women saved their village by fighting off marauders on horseback by binding their husbands’ extra swords to long bamboo poles.
They could now not only reach the marauders and still not get hurt themselves, but they could cut the horses’ legs out from under them. Thus began the traditional martial art of Naginata.