The Five Excellencies
New York where Professor Cheng Man-ch'ing moved in 1964 and subsequently taught t’ai chi. This photo was taken in North Hudson, Manhattan.
© 2023, Steffan Stringer
I have been meaning to write about this for a long time, and each time I try I meet with internal resistance. Writers block.
I was so desperate, I even put the following prompt into ChatGPT:
stub out an article based on Cheng man Ching's five excellences including references.
To be fair it did produce something that I could have published, but it would not have been mine.
If you are curious, check out the link here.
Even as I sit here now, this is tough!
So here goes nothing, but at least it is in my own voice.
We all know who Cheng Man-ch'ing is, he is the orginator of the so-called Yang Short Form, that I have written about extensively on this site. This Form is the one that our school learns first.
Not only was Cheng famous for his t'ai chi, he was an accomplished calligrapher, painter and poet. These three skills were known as the three perfections in the Tang dynasty.
He was also a practitioner of traditional Chinese herbal medicine.
It is said that Cheng regarded the set of all five disciplines as the five excellencies, the 'mark of a well rounded person'.
I felt I wanted to see how I stacked up in these areas of personal development and achievement.
The Art of Calligraphy
Terrible.
I am left handed.
My cursive script is almost illegible and getting more so with age. It's so bad, I should have been a doctor. See The Art of Medicine below.
My score is low.
1/5
The Art of Poetry
Worse than terrible.
For the most part I actively dislike poetry.
Especially haiku (no offense intended!).
I certainly don't write it.
Exceptions might be Shakespeare's writing which I feel reads poetically, but never 'felt' until I watched it performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Or the writing of Laurie Lee, of which I saw some snippets recently, and possibly something I read in school:
Never to be forgotten, that first long secret drink of golden fire, juice of those valleys and of that time, wine of wild orchards, of russet summer, of plump red apples, and Rosie's burning cheeks. Never to be forgotten, or ever tasted again...
The closest I get to writing anything are these blog posts here and on my work website.
Something I also like to do is to try to create slide deck presentations with minimal use of words. It's definitely a skill and an art, and one that I continue to work at, I have an example here.
The calligraphy, poetry and painting arts are of course all 'creative', and I do like 'making things'. Even if it is something as mundane as documentation.
There is great satisfaction in making something neat, concise and perfectly tailored to its purpose.
And even documentation should be beautiful.
I know it is probably bending the framework a little but I am going to give myself a middling score here.
3/5
The Art of Painting
I am struggling with this one, although I was probably the best finger painter in my infant school! I also used to enjoy pottery and took part in after school classes.
Like most arts, they need to be practiced diligently, and I don't.
At best I will do a rough freehand sketch on the back of an envelope when trying to explain something to someone.
I think I am half decent at using graphics packages on computers to illustrate the current 'as is' and future, desired, possible 'to be' states of a problem.
If we can include photograpy here, instead of painting, then I think I am starting to collect some points.
My grandfather gave me my first camera in my mid teens. It was a 35mm Single Lens Reflex made by the German company 'Braun' and came with two lenses, a 35 mm and a 135 mm. It did not have state of the art 'through the lens' light metering, instead the light meter sat just over the lens. I had a lot of fun with that camera before it eventually fell of the back of my bike and the mirror shattered. I went on to set up my own darkroom at home and study black and white developing and printing at school as an ancilliary subject. I even applied to do a degree course in photography at Trent Polytechnic, but as fate would have it, I missed the interview, but that's another story.
If you want to see some of my more recent photograpy, check out Glass.
For painting with light…
4/5
The Art of Medicine
I am quite good at first aid! And can keep a pretty clear head when the blood starts to flow.
On a field course on a remote island I popped this fellow's knee cap back in place. Mostly because I could not bear to hear him screaming any more.
Watching gory stuff on TV is another story though - you'll find me hiding behind the sofa.
I've even done residential courses in Wilderness Medicine to support an earlier interest in travel and bushcraft.
Does that count?
After scraping a degree in Zoology and Genetics, I applied for a fully funded research position at Cardiff University that would have also given me a PhD in Community Medicine.
I phoned up from one of the UK's trandtional red payphone boxes to get the results of my interview and discovered I had come second. It was not to be.
In the end, and by another route, I have spent my entire professional career working in support of evidence based medicine. First as a research technican and briefly as a study coordinator conducting clinical trials. Later roles have been in quality, management and technology.
Whilst working in that role as a research technician I found myself laid up in hospital for a few days with a chest drain following a spontaneous pneumothorax. I had a visit from my parents and we got on to the topic of me going back to university to study medicine, I mean, how hard can it be? 😉
I think my dad briefly comtemplated funding it, a decision he probably would have regretted!
Lastly on my tally card in this category, I would like to submit my love for cooking - after all we are what we eat!
My food choices haven't always been the healthiest, and I am now doing my best to avoid ultraprocessed foods and cook as much from scratch as possible.
I have done fungal forays and courses in foraging and forest gardening. Whilst I don't grow my own vegetables, we do get a veg box from the local community farm every week. It's a good discipline to encourage 'five-a-day' or 'thirty-a-week'.
3/5
The Art of T'ai Chi
This is where I probably have the most scope for improvement. It's a long road to mastery of traditional Chinese martial arts.
So long as I am physically and mentally able, I plan to keep on learning and practicing.
And hopefully the learning and the practicing keeps me physically and mentally able!
3/5
Summing Up
14/25
Room for improvement.
What's your score?
