Influenced by recent events with my personal life, namely my return to physical activity through running and mild weight training. One thing I have been reading about runners is it is fairly easy once at given level to just maintain at that level, but to get better though you need to train in new and more taxing ways. Thinking about where I am with tea, and I think it has somewhat shown on my blog, I have for quite a while been pretty much maintaining my tea brewing skills.
So I am making a commitment to go back to practice and train with my tea brewing. People may be wondering what exactly I mean by that? I have quite a few ideas, and I will work on seeking them out. Definite things that come to mind is get back in the habit of having somewhat regular tea sessions with minimal distractions, so it can be just me and the tea. Also really digging in and looking into the effects of water on tea, not to mention stop being complacent with good cups of tea, but rather really seek to get to know how to get the absolute best out of each steep of each tea.
Not to mention the photos are not completely unrelated eye-candy. Even though for most teas I use I have a teapot that I am willing to use for them, the few times I have used a gaiwan lately, I have notice my technique has been incredibly sloppy, often dangerous. I mean its always a bad day when you pour near boiling water over your thumb while pouring. So I will also need to set out to practice brewing in a gaiwan as well.
Sometimes it seems being "with skill/practice" is the number one enemy to acquiring more skill through practice. That is not to say it will not be hard, often when people hit these plateaus in fitness, weight loss, aptitude, pretty much anything including tea brewing it is because the easy ways to improve become few and far between, and the margin on improvement over effort becomes quite minimal.
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