Monday, January 18

Like Real Life

In aikido class, I was doing a simple little throw I've done a million times for the last 20 years, it wasn't working and I was getting annoyed. "What's going on here?" I heard my inner self ask impatiently. My aikido partner-an energetic teenager- summed up the situation well. Sometimes aikido class is like building a sand castle, it's beautiful but dissolves with the incoming waves. Like real life.

I figured out the problem as I pedaled home on my bike. Attacker does A and I respond with B , followed by C. Because the uke (attacker) didn't do B the way I expected, it disturbed my response and I got stuck. It was expectation versus the reality of the situation. Like real life. Wait a minute! that sounds like a realization. It was a reminder that training in the dojo is all very nice but it has to apply to the real world or it's worthless.

Don't rely on expectations, they can go awry and when they do, you have to stay centered instead of getting frustrated that things didn't work as you planned. Like real life.

1 comment:

Alyksys said...

The energetic teenager must protest for you have left the most important idea of the sandcastle out!

Everyday, you build a sandcastle that is washed away with the tide. The next day, you must build it again. And it will be more grand than ever before. You cannot try to preserve the castle for it will dry out, crumble, and no longer be what you originally had. You must allow what you learned from the building of that sandcastle to remain with you, but let go of the castle itself.

The next day upon your beach venture, you will be able to build a much more beautiful castle than you ever could before.

Aikido is the perfect example of this castle. What you have learned you can take away with you, but the showing of that skill cannot be preserved or recreated. Everyday, you have a new empty beach on which your castle can be built. Without that clean mindset, you castle cannot be as unique and one of a kind.

So on one day, you cannot expect to find yourself building the same sand castle. You can only make new.

The energetic teenager signs off.