13 years ago:  I'd recently injured a shoulder and was looking for something more easygoing to replace my lift-weights-to-loud-music class. Having been raised on blue blood sports, I was unfamiliar with the in-fashion exercise offerings at the health club: Pilates, Gyrokinesis, Nia, etc. I thought about trying something called Zumba, but it met at an inconvenient time. Next up the list – Tai Chi. Why not. A good time to try something new. So I signed up for the beginners class taught by Ben Booth.

6:15am today:  I stand barefoot on the gravel driveway, taking first steps to put my soft winter feet back into summer condition. Child's feet, that's what I want, feet that go everywhere and feel everything. Tai Chi feet. For the last decade I've repeated this routine each year. It will take at least a month of this to be able to easily walk up and back the 100 ft driveway.  This morning, a few short steps is all I could bear. Tomorrow a couple more. Later on today I will practice the first 10 seconds of the form, including the standing still part. And then, while my coffee reheats in the microwave, I'll do a tree pose imagining I'm a heron standing at water's edge. Gently put, this all may sound a bit eccentric.

So, what happened between then and now? No radical changes. But Tai Chi has burrowed into my life and made it more interesting. Saying just how and why is difficult. Its scope is vast, and its non-western foundations and viewpoints are confusing. Ben illuminates Tai Chi with a thousand stories, wondrous extemporaneous explanations, and demonstrations that dazzle. And I, these many years later, still struggle to describe it to an outsider in a way that doesn't come out sounding like New Age mush.

A few things I could not have said 13 years ago:

• In a conference area on the mezzanine level above the Cinnabon at Charlotte- Douglas airport, Barret and I remove our shoes and practice the form. We don't think about the travelers who pass by.

• As an architect, I'd never try to put a house that was designed for level land on a hillside. But on the soft wet sand of a tidal flat, I found myself basically trying to do just that as I struggled to make my kick-spin there look like one I practice on a hardwood floor. Rather than one that is comfortable with soft sand.

• On a motel parking lot in Burlington Vt, I did the snake walk under a tree full of butterflies.

• Connections: The relaxation of the arms and hands that makes martial mayhem in Tai Chi possible is the same relaxation that enables me to hit a good golf shot.

• Doubts: I'm essentially lazy, I'm busy with other things, and I don't engage with Tai Chi at the depth that Ben invites me to.

• A French engineer/philosopher interested in minimal structures and material economy set for himself the ambitious goal of creating an “infinite span with zero weight”. Impossible of course, but nevertheless a worthy idea to drive creative thinking. Tai Chi proposes similar provocative riddles and contradictions, initially confusing, that become revealing when examined.

• I'll never know the 10,000 ways of Tai Chi. But I'm grateful for having some familiarity with 100 and hope to learn and feel a few more. Maybe someday I'll even learn how to bring the focus & awareness to my form that I routinely bring to the spinning blade of a table saw.

• Early on in my practice, I told my sister Katie White that I was taking Tai Chi classes in Cambridge with a guy who grew up around boats on Cape Cod. “That's nice”, she responded, with the voice that indicated a certainty that her brother's strange new enthusiasm was far enough away from her that it would never touch her directly.

13 years ago, I came to Tai Chi on a whim. I continue with it today because I like the ways it makes me think. I like the way it feels. And because I like to be around Ben.