Of Course, I Can Do That...

You never for­get how to ride a bike — maybe I’m just extra­or­di­nar­ily stu­pid, but
I’ve proven that one wrong.

I was spend­ing the week­end with a girl­friend in a small Japanese vil­lage and had vol­un­teered to make a con­bini (a won­der­ful lit­tle Jap-English cor­rup­tion of “con­ve­nience store”) run for some drinks. Since it was a nice day, I fig­ured that, rather than drive the two kilo­me­ters to the 7/11, I would just bor­row my girlfriend’s bike and enjoy some fresh air. Things were going well for a few min­utes. Then, as I was com­ing down the hill toward the store I real­ized that I couldn’t remem­ber how to stop. “Oh, shit!”

I fum­bled as I tried to turn and simul­ta­ne­ously jump off in the park­ing lot. I didn’t fall, but I’m pretty sure that I looked like a com­plete idiot to the crowd of high school stu­dents hang­ing out on the curb as I skid­ded to a halt. Once I regained my bal­ance and com­po­sure, I looked down at where my hands were grip­ping the han­dle bars and noticed the brakes. “Oh yeah, brakes…”

I’ve for­got­ten how to ride var­i­ous other “bikes” too.

For exam­ple, at the 2006 American Taido sum­mer camp, Mitsuaki asked me to help some­one with henin no hokei. It seemed like a good idea at first — after all, I’m the guy who knows all the hokei, right? I used to be one of the only peo­ple in America to know any of the women’s hokei, and I’ve since learned almost all of the hokei in Taido. But when I started watch­ing this stu­dent move, I real­ized that I couldn’t remem­ber it to save my life. Unfortunately, she was just learn­ing the rou­tine and couldn’t keep things straight any bet­ter than I could, so I had to ask one of my stu­dents from Tech to help her instead.

Afterwards, I just couldn’t believe that I had for­got­ten a hokei. But I did for­get. I mean, I totally for­got it. I prob­a­bly should have been embar­rassed, but my par­ents raised me to have a high thresh­old of self-consciousness (in other words, I usu­ally don’t notice when i’m mak­ing a fool of myself).

The moral of the above anec­dotes is that, even if some­thing is com­mon sense, it’s folly to take things for granted. Indeed, Einstein is noted for say­ing that com­mon sense is “the col­lec­tion of prej­u­dices and assump­tions one acquires by the age of eigh­teen and then believes until death.” I think that’s a pretty good char­ac­ter­i­za­tion. When phrased in terms of “prej­u­dices and assump­tions” com­mon sense doesn’t sound so attrac­tive an attribute to pos­sess. Everyone knows, when you make an assump­tion, you make an ass of u and… mption? Anyway, to the point — 

I try to learn from my mis­takes, so in addi­tion to relearn­ing henin no hokei, I’ve been hunt­ing lately for other instances where what-I-thought-I-knew and what-I-could-actually-bring-myself-to-use were incon­gru­ent. Here’s what I found:

Reality Sneaking Up On Me

It’s always good to begin a list that you know will reveal uncom­fort­able real­i­ties with some­thing nice. I was recently sur­prised to find out that my nengi is good. This came as a shock since I’ve always thought of nen­tai as my worst/least-comfortable tech­nique in Taido. However, that lead me to prac­tice it harder than I did sen or ten. I’m pretty good at both of these types of move­ments, and now my extra nen­tai prac­tice seems to have paid off somewhat.

Next, I need to work on hen and un. A lot. I had assumed that my hen and un were ok, but a tech­ni­cal checkup a cou­ple of weeks ago reveals that I was mis­taken. I’ve long been aware that my sha­jogeri is awful, but I have to admit that I’m a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed in myself for let­ting my other hen­tai kicks slide so far. Though my defen­sive jumps have improved lately, my untai attacks are a lot weaker than I remem­ber. Of course, some of this may have to do with my stan­dards becom­ing stricter, but in either event, my un and hen are not up to snuff.

Another thing I thought I had down was maai, which in my def­i­n­i­tion includes, but is not lim­ited by, dis­tance. My recent tour­na­ment per­for­mance and some com­ments from friends and teach­ers reveals that my maai is not nearly so good as I had thought. What seems to be hap­pen­ing is that I can accu­rately judge the timing/spacing of my engage­ments defen­sively much bet­ter than I can while advanc­ing on an oppo­nent. This is bad news, because rely­ing on the abil­ity to defend or escape is not typ­i­cally a sound strat­egy. There is a time and place for every­thing, includ­ing aggres­sion. I can move aggres­sively, but when I do so, I find myself falling short of my tar­get all too often. This tells me that, even when I am attack­ing, I still har­bor some uncertainty/indecision which is pre­vent­ing me from devot­ing myself to a course of action. This has neg­a­tive ram­i­fi­ca­tion both on and off the court.

My gen­tai is poor. This is another weak­ness come to light as a result of tour­na­ment par­tic­i­pa­tion. As some­one who is con­stantly telling stu­dents the impor­tance of gen­tai, I’m ashamed to real­ize that I’m not doing such an exem­plary job of it, myself. Gentai is the return to a safe, detached point of obser­va­tion after an action — in jis­sen, this means return­ing to kamae after a strike. While the effi­cacy of shobu-ippon rules is debat­able from the per­spec­tive of fight train­ing, there are sound philo­soph­i­cal rea­sons for doing so — at least part of the time. Part of my prob­lem here is that, in rec­og­niz­ing the nec­es­sary con­ti­nu­ity of all events, I don’t really think in terms of end­ings or fin­ish­ing. However, indi­vid­ual tasks within the larger con­tin­uum do, indeed, have con­clu­sions, and there are always con­se­quences for fail­ing to see them through. This is some­thing I need to work on both per­son­ally and physically.

Another thing I’ve recently dis­cov­ered is that rebuild­ing my endurance is a bitch. I’ve always been in “good” phys­i­cal con­di­tion. I’ve twice devel­oped a slight belly (as a result of test­ing a few dietary the­o­ries — one of which was based on the notion that obtain­ing the major­ity of one’s caloric intake from ice cream and beer was a sus­tain­able strat­egy), but it didn’t last long either time. I’m strong; I’m fairly fast; my body fat fluc­tu­ates between “ath­letic” and “low-average” lev­els; but my endurance is crap. What’s worse, I’m find­ing that I really don’t enjoy doing the work to improve it.

Symptoms and Causes

All of these incon­gru­en­cies I’ve found in my Taido prac­tice are symp­toms of deeper per­sonal issues in my life. I’ve always had a hard time gath­er­ing the self-discipline to do unpleasant-but-necessary tasks, even when they aren’t all that dif­fi­cult. I also have a his­tory of leav­ing projects uncom­pleted. I tend to deal well with exter­nal pres­sure and can han­dle most chal­lenges as they arise, but I’m not what I would call a go-getter. I thrive on changes that occur because they allow me to use my cre­ativ­ity, but I don’t have Uchida Sensei’s gift for dream­ing big and cat­alyz­ing changes. Finally, I tend to let things slide once i’ve accom­plished some arbi­trary min­i­mum achieve­ment goal. Sometimes I for­get that we lose what we don’t use — and there’s plenty I’m not using to its full capacities.

Without get­ting into a self-psycho-analysis, which would prob­a­bly inter­est most read­ers about as much as watch­ing me get a vasec­tomy, I have a few the­o­ries about what is caus­ing these issues in my life. And I also have a few the­o­ries on how I can go about turn­ing a few of them around, though a cou­ple of them are pretty con­found­ing at the moment. Perhaps work­ing towards find­ing solu­tions for a cou­ple of these issues will give me some insights into the oth­ers as well.

I’ll have to wait and see on that, but I’m pretty opti­mistic that by con­tin­u­ing to apply Taido thought processes to my per­sonal issues, I’ll be able to keep evolv­ing and grow­ing as a per­son, as a teacher, and as a stu­dent. Of course, I’ll never approx­i­mate towards per­fec­tion, but each suc­ces­sive issue of which I become aware is one I can attempt to improve, and doing so will in turn give me greater capac­ity for see­ing and under­stand­ing other aspects of myself that could use some work.

I believe that this is a process we can each apply to our per­sonal lives and to our Taido per­for­mance. Doing so with con­scious intent is the road to mastery.