In tai chi, as a martial art and as a healing art, the source of power is the ground. Our connection to the ground through our feet is the foundation of everything that we do, so severing that connection is (almost) always a bad thing. That is why there are so few jumps in the tai chi form, and why when we practice together the goal is to cause your partner’s feet to leave the ground. The principle of yin and yang says that one foot must be the dominant connection to the ground. There is no such thing as equal connection to the earth through both feet simultaneously. That’s as sensible as saying the moon has two dark sides or two lighted sides. Equal weight means no connection at all, and this is very dangerous, so we strive to maintain single-weightedness, and when shifting weight, to minimize the time we spend at or near 50 / 50 weight distribution.
So the foot that has 51% through 100% of the load of the body is the weighted foot, and it is the foot on which we focus our attention to connect with the power of the ground. The other foot is free to do other things – step, kick, sweep, whatever – but it is empty, and should not distract us from the central concern which is to connect to the earth through the weighted foot.
In testing we very often need to tap into the power of the ground, the power of thoroughly knowing the territory we are in, so our tests are grounded in valid, factually correct system models, exploring a particular coverage area, with oracles that we understand – or if we don’t understand them, we understand the schema of them and can identify the holes we are trying to fill. We need to work to solve one problem at a time, which leads us to control the variables in our tests and vary them systematically. We need to have a leg to stand on, which in testing terms means we need to have a reason for testing where we are, a risk model and theory of error that locates our testing in high-value space.
Most of all, though, what I bring to testing from training in single-weightedness is the feeling of committing to the problem. All of my attention and effort is going into understanding this exact spot in the app, and grounding myself in the problem space so that when I have to tell the quality story, it comes all the way up from the ground, not just from the top of my head.
Jul 162008
