"Human beings are great, Ou-San." "Very great, Sensei."
Such was an exchange between my previous teacher and Our Teacher at the latest Kokikai Fall Camp. This is the stuff of myth--philosophical aggrandizing on the nature of humanity, the wizened old master, having come from the East to train his disciples, spreads truth throughout the land so that it may prevail in the face of ugliness..
And, all joking aside, what I am left with from these experiences is scarcely words, and not quite vision or experience, but more feeling than anything. After that weekend, my body had become butter. I was tenderized. It was great. For a time, nothing bothered me. I was floating on a cloud. And then, of course, we all go back to the real world--it's not what you do on the mat, but what you take off of it, to echo the most profound of cliches.
What I am left with is feeling, because the proof is in the pudding. What I get out of these experiences (much less than whatever I can give), is the feeling that comes from being around people who have or are attempting to live in a masterful way. To make your life a work of art itself, I would postulate, is as much the ultimate purpose of an art like aikido as any. And, like so many things, this bears fruit not as an explicitly stated objective--in the land of new-age nanny-pandering--but as a byproduct of so many tangibly and intangibly related variables--sweat, being pounded into a mat so hard it makes you scream, the impeccable lightness of touch yet utter control felt when taking ukemi for individuals who have been working on that very technique for the last 20 years.
The basic principles: Correct posture, relax progressively, keep one point, positive mind. "It sounds so simple and dumb," Dennis Sensei (6th dan) recently remarked, "but it really works."
The striking thing about philosophical systems is that the number of words encapsulated or espoused in their principles doesn't appear to have anything to do with how people actually live their lives. Why should it? Words are words, good for many things--but ultimately words. Activity is something else. Practice is practice. And it seems that it just comes back to practice, over and over again.
I wonder why, as a culture, we seem unwilling to recognize that--that what we practice, we will become. That, for instance, if we are going to continue to perpetuate a system of test-taking for the sake of test-taking as a fundamental attribute of how young people should spend their hours, then we will create individuals that are primarily concerned with status, obsessed with comparison and the accumulation of self-ascribed labels. Why do we delude ourselves into thinking that living in destructive ways will lead us to become anything but destructive, self-loathing people? We expect to cover ourselves with acid and emerge with gleaming skin. Reality takes a holiday.
I want to explain to you why I keep doing this thing, and why, if it is a Monday or Wednesday night, or Saturday morning, my plans are set, with the possible and unforeseen exception of activities of an equally transcendent nature.
In this case, I would like to quote from a source (Ellis Amdur, Dueling with O-Sensei: Grappling with the Myth of the Warrior-Sage) more competent than myself, which encapsulates the essence of what the purpose of this training is, as far as I can tell:
I work with teens who rape and rob and murder. And their eyes, in all-too-few unguarded moments, are the same as those of my sons. I have had my heart cracked several times by young men who say to me, “I wish you had been my father,” as I say good-bye, they going to prison to serve sentences as adults, me going home to a quiet meal with my family. That simple phrase comes from their heart as they see, all too late, that there is a power that is beyond that of the power to either take from life or take life itself. There is nothing weak about this power, nothing false nor colluding with evil. Ueshiba called it love--and the message stands.
The youth of all of our countries need the involvement of adults, not as friends, but as people who can model what it is to be a true man or woman. They need to be in the company of adults who can teach them---not how to be nice, but how to be powerful in the best sense. How will you use your power, your understanding of harmony acquired in aikido practice? If you do not use it to help at least some people outside of your family, particularly children, from the stranglehold of the death culture they are living, then I do not believe you are doing anything that can be called aikido. You are going through the motions—that’s all. You disagree? The message stands…
…You go to the dojo, you advance though the ranks, your wrist locks will make a man of iron squeal into submission, and your throws send your partners into a soft journey into the Great Void. The real question, however, remains: What will you bring home?
Returning to Claremont for the first time in two years, I stood in that familiar, still night with my former teacher, waiting for his wife to pick him up. Perhaps over-ambitiously, I had come straight from LAX at the onset of a Thanksgiving visit to my dad's, still high on a weekend of aikido, followed by a special visit by Sensei Maruyama to our dojo the next day, where I was able to take ukemi from him for the first time. "Too excited!" he had said, pointing at me. Being thrown by this tiny and eccentric 72-year old man was more or less what I imagine it's like to be hit by a thousand pounds of bricks dropped from a tall height--only to have them suddenly removed the instant before having my spine crushed. I want more. At the end of class, I thanked him, to which he boisterously replied, to my surprise, "So much talent! But need to cultivate! Talent is one thing, but.. More ukemi practice!"
Watching young students leisurely walk by, we looked out in silence over a now, empty courtyard I had walked across too many times to count. I thought about the distance of this place and the position of gravity it once held in my inner, outer, and everything-life. Years of conversations, problem sets, exams, lying on couches in solace, glinting at the sun from such and such angle, and what am I left with? Just a feeling. Some kind of fast-forward tape spinning between breathes, going so fast. Closing my eyes now, I can't even begin to catch it. Can I inhabit the body of my 18-year old self and remember what it was to be that person and live that life?
And then I was back. "Seems about the same," I told my teacher, "minus the suffering." He chuckled. "Or the ecstasy. Just a campus." Turning our thoughts to camp, I mentioned that I had enjoyed watching his voluntary 5-person randori. I brought up Sensei's comment to him, spoken while dozens of grown men and women, many capable of inflicting severe devastation upon most conceivable attackers, eagerly awaited the next sequence of events, like the good children they are.
"Very great? Did I say that?" "Yep." "Ah, well..'Hai, Sensei! Whatever you say!'" We laughed, and I waved goodbye to my teacher and his wife and daughter, this great human being, his great family.
"The difference between being in the world, and with it." -Will
I've noticed that many people seem to buy into the idea that adulthood means, "playing an elaborate game of dress-up." That is, playing inside a new, bigger sandbox, with toys you didn't used to have.
I used to have a lot of well-defined ideas about age, and what temporal experience should constitute (and deliver), namely about those older than me. Sophomore, Junior means something--and beyond that, big! 25--a real adult, 30, mature, 40, surely wise. But that's what happens when you circumscribe your behavior onto others, before realizing you're interpolating onto data sets that are very different than the one you're working with. Remarking to a friend recently about the apparent bizarreness of people our age or older still living in ways I associate with years past gone, she added, "we've stayed children--but in all the worst ways."
Play is something "for kids," while "work," is something for "adults." That's what we're led to believe. Anything worth doing takes work. Any child who's given the opportunity to create, test, repeat, and refine a science experiment over a lengthy period of time will figure that out. Frustration, failure, and confusion will all play their role--but without the numbness, sense of irrelevance, and general pointlessness that comes from mechanically performing tasks for the sake of some future, shadowy reward. Joy will be there, throughout. Meaning will be there, too. Two words you will never hear in most classrooms. What role do joy or curiosity have to play in the company of "achievement"? Not much, since they are not easily quantified. Meaning sometimes finds its way under the stupefyingly abstruse, "critical analysis," but then, only rarely outside the bounds of pre-dissected/digested lines of thought which ostensibly serve as some link on the ladder.
Adulthood is not playing, as in "playing around,"--it's for keeps, it's for real! Not playing in, but playing with--ideas, conceptions, roles. To be a True Man or Woman is to recognize no one is going to clean up for you after the milk is spilt, and instead of walking away, crying, or reaching for another glass, you're gonna sit there, and you're gonna clean up that milk. And you're going to take that cloth, mop it up, and sit in your wet, uncomfortable pants, and laugh to yourself, or sing a song. And you're going to drink something later, when you're done. But that's not important right now. Right now you're cleaning up.
An unscientific mental survey of friends in my age range:
D: grad school, living at home J: grad school, living at home G: grad school D: employed (!) A: virtually unemployed A: employed, living at home A: employed/grad school, living at home H: unemployed, living at home T: virtually unemployed L: temping, living at home M: employed L: grad school L: employed M: employed R: grad school E: temporarily employed H: grad school N: grad school
Don't hold onto ideas or plans because of prior merit. Thoughts are just models; the present is reality. The sooner sunk costs are accepted, the more time and energy available to spend on what actually matters.
"What I point out to you is only that you shouldn't allow yourselves to be confused by others." -Master Linji
Always amazed by the wondrous effects of giving up hope. Makes me wander why I couldn't just start from that position, barring the unrealistic expectation of beginning from a lack of delusions. Abandon all hope! Then you can truly live, free from the crippling illusions society perpetuates in and out of our thin skulls.
"You're not stuck when you think you're stuck." -Otto Sensei
Tonight nyuanshin asked me how life was and where I thought it was heading. I paused for a moment and responded, "in flux, as its' always been, but I'm getting used to that."
As I've gotten older, I become progressively less attached to specific outcomes or paths outside of the core which orient me through both turbulence and smoothness. As a result, my life has acquired a certain constancy to it (within and among that flux) that I wouldn't have dreamed of 5 or 6 years ago, despite lacking the greater certainty I had about many things then. And I keep growing.
In Full House, Stephen Jay Gould eloquently argues that variation is in fact, the rule, as far as evolution is considered, and our tendency to idealize or gravitate toward particular individuals, traits, or species as a given standard of "normalcy" is bizarre and basically a mythology. From (a degree of) self-awareness arises the desire to seek certainty in what is actually a chaotic universe; construction and categorization of linear archetypes is a socially sanctioned form of comfort.
People who lack control of their own lives constantly seek to amend their decisions. They never fully live in the present because regret of the past always lurks in the background. They think, if they had just chosen and planned more carefully, things wouldn't be this way. They would be happier. More fulfilled. I should know; I wasted enough years living that way.
Intelligent people from wealthy societies are especially prone to this brand of fatalism, due to the apparent limitless array of choices at one's disposal. Dissatisfied people chase these endless branches, repeating the same mistakes until they feel burdened with guilt and regret. This is a form of stagnancy, the root of pain.
The only way out of this cycle is self-love. Believe in yourself and your choices. Accept the inevitability of loneliness, inadequacy, and despair. Then recognize that you're big enough to contain these feelings, and that they don't define you. Only then are you free to live in accordance with yourself.
The other night at gamelan rehearsal, a woman of awesome musical skill, who is often perceived as one of the more misanthropic members of the group, told me, with measurable empathy, in response to my tale of two-weeks of sickness-induced absence: "That's why it's nice to have someone to take care of you."
Maybe I should move somewhere where I can afford a servant. Seriously though, I am thinking more and more my plan is to stay around here for a few years--the mental point of when it "makes sense to move" is when I get my shodan--saving enough to move to one of the many enthralling and sufficiently different places on earth where I can live just fine on < $5000-$6000/year (incidentally, this effectively includes South America, Asia, and Africa). Why not?
No Sincerity, No Timing: Ignorant (unstable orbit--easily amended, best place to start) Sincerity, No Timing: Crude (sink) Timing, No Sincerity: Lecherous (sink) Timing and Sincerity: Masterful (stable orbit)
Friday night a woman aggressively tried to pick me up at a club. She had a great body but her dancing didn't leave much to the imagination. Harmonization is where honesty meets timing.
I had my 3rd kyu test yesterday. My brothers and step-dad came and recorded it. Here's the freestyle portion of it. Fun! Pretty interesting for me to watch. Two minute is a long time, yet I could remember very little afterwards. Some parts felt a bit grabby when I was in the thick of it, but everyone was complimenting me afterwards, so I guess it wasn't too bad. Mary and Brad said to me, "Most people tense up when they end up in an uncertain situation or when something unexpected happens, but you just got more relaxed. It was really impressive and unusual to see at this level." That was a reaffirmation of my entire 20s to date. Thank you!
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