The fog arrived silently, blanketing everything, and softening the contours of objects until from a distance you couldn't tell where human figures ended and the outlines of the Monterey Pines began.  Maybe it was an omen; later I learned that in classical Chinese paintings, fog is used as a metaphor for the Tao, the name for the Intelligence that unites all objects, ideas and events in the universe.  According to ancient Chinese philosophy, the Tao, like the fog, includes everything, but emphasizes nothing in particular.  In Taoist paintings, the same mist that touches the wings of an eagle circling high above a mountain also condenses and drips from the straw hat of the solitary monk hiking along the mountain trail.  All three -- eagle, mountain and Taoist -- are only tiny figures in the corner of the landscape covered from border to border by fog.

              The fog had come up in the night, rising from the surface of Lake Merced and had slipped in over the campus of San Francisco State University, where I was going to school.  By eight-forty-five in the morning it had started to thin a little, but the soupy air still veiled the figures gathering in the gymnasium courtyard, giving them a slightly eerie quality.  I was surprised to discover that there were already more than forty people there waiting for the class to begin.  Another boy arrived behind me by bicycle, wearing shorts in spite of the cold, and a long sleeved shirt with the tails hanging out.  He locked his bike in the bike rack and found a place to sit on one of the stone benches next to an elderly couple -- Caucasian man, Chinese wife.

              At nine o'clock sharp, the door to the gym opened and the teacher marched out.  She was a short, round Chinese woman who wore her dour expression like a thick cotton jacket.

              "Line up," she commanded.  There were so many of us that our hastily formed lines snaked from one end of the courtyard to almost the other end.

              "Follow me," she said.  I looked around to see if I was the only one who didn't have a clue what I was doing.  Every eye was on the teacher.  I looked back to her, and was suddenly struck by the odd sensation that she appeared simultaneously graceful and tremendously powerful -- a combination I'd never witnessed in person before.  Slowly, she lifted one foot off the ground, and then gently set just the heel down.  Her two hands floated up and embraced the empty fog in front of her, the knife edge of her right palm bisecting the flat of her left.

              "Strike Palm to Salute Buddha," she intoned.  Awkwardly, I imitated her posture.

              Stepping backwards a pace, she slowly shifted her weight to the rear foot and drew her hands past her hip.  "Grasp the Bird's Tail," she said.

              One by one, I followed her delicate, deliberate motions, moving slowly, softly, silently.  Like the fog.  Standing in the middle of the class, I could feel the heat generated from the forty-plus other bodies:  old men and young women, young college students, someone's ten year old daughter, Caucasians, Asians and Blacks, a football player and me.  We were a sea of motion, our hands the constant waves.

              Without warning, heat that sizzled like electricity, or like the flush from taking too much niacin, surged through my body.  My temples began to throb, although not painfully like a headache, and I heard a loud humming in my ears.  Darkness crept in around the edges of my vision; almost immediately it was replaced by the perception that every detail around me was illuminated and highlighted -- the teacher, the students, and the thin film of green moss covering the red bricks of the courtyard.

              I have read that the hair of people who survive being struck by lightning stands on end for a day or two.  As the sudden light and sound slowly subsided, I could feel the tickle of every hair standing up along my arms and legs and on the nape of my neck.  These movements, stumbling and imperfect as they were, had somehow triggered one of those magical times when we leap ahead of our personal evolution, a moment when my body and mind united with a vital energy that had been dormant, yet always present, inside of me.  I couldn't know then that a little more than a decade later I would go to China to win a world Silver medal in T'ai Chi performance; the highest award China has ever given a non-Asian.  All I knew was that I had been waiting for this moment all my life.