The fundamental principle of Tai Chi is balance. To never lose your balance when you are attacked. As long as you are standing you have a chance. You fall down and your opponent has the upper hand. At the root of all the slow movements of this incredibly beautiful martial art, the mother of all other forms, is a return to equilibrium.
Patrick used to be my hairdresser for a few years. One of the many Westerners who came to India and never went back. We both used to wait for my monthly haircuts - he, because he could talk in French non-stop, and me because I got to practice my French, AND hear a million stories! About his native Marseilles, his mother who would keep an extra place at the table every Christmas for someone who had no place to go to, and his fisherman grandfather who could predict the heavy winds of the mistral by the colour of the sky. His colleagues at the saloon would smile when I walk in. They knew Patrick would be in a great mood the rest of the day. :)
He had told me once that he had learned Tai Chi from a Chinese teacher in Marseilles 30+ years ago, and how he still practices it. How it has helped him through so much. And how people ask him to teach it, but he doesn't want to. He was a man of strong opinions. So I didn't ask, though I wanted to continue the Tai Chi I had learned many many years ago.
But suddenly one day in 2016 he asks me - do you want me to teach you Tai Chi? I couldn't believe it. And so started our weekly early morning sessions in Jayamahal park. He would explain so beautifully, in French, how everything about Tai Chi was about balance. You open, you close. You rise, you descend. You give, you take. And you repeat, again and again and again. You stand with your feet firm on the ground, and move slowly, gracefully, barely displacing the air.
It was just other-worldly, I could barely breathe. I had goose-bumps every single time.
Later on, you realize why he did that. He knew he was going to die. He wanted to pass on whatever he could, while there was still time. He was waiting for his biopsy report. He had lung cancer. I was with him and his wife the last few months. The hospital. The treatment at home. And I helped to call his daughter and speak to her in French and ask her to advance her ticket, there would be no time. She made it, 2 days before he passed on. She brought him the smells of his hometown, from the Southern coast of France. Lavender oil, Marseilles soap made of olives, traditional sweets.
He left with the smells of his childhood, half-conscious. Maybe that was closure in one way. You go out into the world, you return.
And so I move on, the sum of all the innumerable gifts so many have given me, so generously, so whole-heartedly. I try to give it all away, this embarrassment of riches, but the universe keeps refilling my bowl, again and again, in the most unexpected of ways.
On a Day when Hostility rules the News
Rosemerry Trommer
Patrick, featured here: https://www.magzter.com/article/Celebrity/HiBLITZ/Je-taime-Bangalore
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