Make It Beautiful

Good form has beauty. If what I am doing does not look beautiful, the chances are very high that I am not doing right. This principle seems to apply to everything from the most elaborate sword work to the lowly burpee.

Beauty can be an elusive yardstick, at bottom a you-know-it when-you-see-it quality. The real work seems to be figuring out the nuts and bolts of what will make a given movement beautiful. Tinkering endlessly with alignment and economizing motion. Increasing extension while maintaining stability. Fiddling with timing and minute details of position to get one piece of motion to unfold seamlessly into the next. Meditating upon how to tap various sources of power within the body, at exactly the right moment. But most of all, a willingness to persevere through seemingly endless clumsy, even down-right ugly, repetitions in the long quest toward beauty.