Last Saturday night I played guitar, both solo and accompanying my friend Rob Balder, at a gig at Balticon, a sci-fi/fantasy/gaming convention in Baltimore. It was not one of my best performances. Rob and I did a new arrangement of a tune we had done before, and it never hit its stride, it felt slow and square. Another tune I sang well but my guitar work was kind of iffy, it was the first time I’d done it in front of an audience. (I did a fine job on one song, where all I did was play guitar instead of having to sing as well, and I just executed the song.)

I can pick out greater and lesser reasons for my struggles.

T’ai chi hurts to do. The benefits are enormous, and the cost is pain. The nice part is, the same deal applies to most things in life. If you want to be a great guitar player, your fingers will hurt. If you want to be a great athlete, your muscles will hurt. My teacher Chris Casey says, “There is no way out. But there is a way through.”

When I worked with James Bach on a Satisfice project he would ask me uncomfortable questions about what I was doing and why I was doing it. He’d ask, “Tell me what this bug is at its core.” I’d say, “When I click this button, I get an error message instead of the dialog I’m expecting.”

“Why do you expect a dialog?”

“Because that’s how the app is supposed to work.”

“How do you know?”

“It worked that way another time.”

“Ahh, so there is an inconsistency between how it worked before and the way it works now. What is different? How do you know that they are not both right?”

OK, so you have relaxed, you have found your feet, you stand straight up. How do you move? You can learn a lot about how you move by watching other people move and walk around. Notice where their movement originate in their bodies, and how the impulse flows through them. Some people lead with their head, like they are on stilts and constantly trying to catch up with their noggin. Some people lead with their shoulders, hunched up, or defensive. Some people lead with their knees and shins, banging into things. Some lead with their chest, puffed up and top heavy. T’ai chi practice is to initiate all movement in the center of gravity, called the t’an tien. The masters were not fooling around when they said “all movement” – all physical movement, breath, emotion, thought, everything was moderated by the t’an tien. In fact all sensory intake is channeled to the t’an tien, where it is processed into life energy and initiates our reactions.

Taoist philosophy links heaven above with earth below via the upright human. Since tai chi is the embodiment of Taoism (at least in part – Professor cheng Man-Ching said that his tai chi was 30% Lao Tzu (Taoist) and 70% Confucius (Confucianism)), the principle is interpreted very literally. The spine is said to link heaven and earth, so one carries oneself as though the top of the head were suspended from above on a string, and the sacrum was attached to a thousand-pound weight. The spine itself has separation between the joints, is not kinked or bent sideways (though the natural front to back curves remain), and offers the most space in the torso for the organs to function. The image is a string of pearls suspended from above. It maintains its shape as it moves through space, the pearls do not lean on one another, and it can move freely in any direction according to any force applied to it, and returns to the straight form after the force is gone.

When we are physically straight, our limbs are free to move in any direction and manner, so we can respond in any way necessary. Our lungs have maximum capacity for best functioning, and all our organs have space to move around and get a healthful little massage as you go through the day. When I lean over with hands in pockets, I may look cool (or not!), but I have a lot of work to do to get back into position to respond to my environment. And I have lost my connection to the earth – see the post on single-weightedness.

In testing, straightness comes into play when we enter a test open to any possibility of system behavior. If I have the feeling of straightness, I can deploy resources as soon as they are needed, whether it is tools or data or asking help from my professional contacts. If I test with purpose, committing the full weight of my intellect to the test, I am straight, not leaning over and nonchalalantly testing with my psyche half-engaged.

With straightness, I can link the micro activities of testing with the macro activities of model building and contextualization: by maintaining my connection to the ground/yin (my mission and models) and heaven/yang (the details of day to day testing). This is embodied physically by using the lower body to connect to the ground and control your own body’s position in space, while using the hands and arms to connect to your partner in practice, listening to their balance and transmitting the force of your movements. They can’t work together without straightness.

The notion of straightness has a lot of connotations in English, one of which is “integrity”. Great testing requires integrity of thought and action, and also integrity of reporting. Practicing physical straightness helps me get the feeling of mental and ethical straighness as well so I can tell when I’m not really flexible, really engaged, really forthright, and stop leaning over, take my hands out of my pockets, look the app in the eye, and engage.