Consider It

The two words “con­sider it” hap­pen to make up one of my favorite English-language phrases. I was once asked what was required in order to be con­sid­er­ate — my answer was “con­sider it.”

Taido/Blog Gets Sick

So, fore­go­ing any kind of clever segue, a few months ago, I lost the abil­ity to do any­thing at all to Taido/Blog. Obviously, I have now cor­rected the issue, but the nature of the actual prob­lem is still some­what mys­te­ri­ous to me — it’s some­thing semi-technical that falls under the gen­eral rubric of “things I’ve cho­sen not to bother with learn­ing to under­stand.” Luckily for me, an upgrade of my WordPress build pretty much took care of things.

I had intended to write this as a sim­ple blurb to say “sorry about the lack of updates — I had a good excuse,” but after reread­ing that first para­graph, I real­ize that it’s not actu­ally all that good of an excuse. Things I’ve cho­sen not to bother with learn­ing to under­stand? Come to think of it, that’s a really lame excuse and exactly the kind of think­ing I claim to be work­ing against with Taido/Blog.

Choosing To Ignore Reality

But. If I take the time to con­sider it, I can find lots of exam­ples of this will­ful igno­rance in my life, and I have to admit it’s not some­thing of which I’m extremely proud. Not to point the fin­ger, but I’m will­ing to bet big money that read­ers of this site would also find a dis­turb­ing num­ber of behav­iors and atti­tudes with which they allow them­selves to sim­ply get by — things they could eas­ily change.

I’m not refer­ring here to social issues like the ram­pant home­less­ness in our urban cen­ters, the hor­ri­ble out­look for future ecol­ogy, or the deplorable state of pol­i­tics and com­merce. I’m talk­ing about things eas­ily within our grasp. Obviously, per­sonal habits are ripe for care­ful exam­i­na­tion. What do you allow your­self to get away with when you know you could do bet­ter? Do you some­times “cheat” just a lit­tle bit? Do you allow your­self maybe just a lit­tle too much lee­way when you’re try­ing to accom­plish a task or goal? I know I do. In the five min­utes it’s taken me to type this post so far, I’ve already noticed the fol­low­ing habit­ual cheats:

• not shav­ing on the week­ends, even though it makes mon­day morn­ings just a lit­tle bit more of a pain in the ass
• not stick­ing to my sched­uled work­out plans despite hav­ing the time to do so
• neglect­ing to prac­tice gui­tar modal pat­terns even though it’s prob­a­bly the best way to rebuild my technique
• drink­ing a beer instead of a cup of coffee
• drink­ing a cup of cof­fee instead of a glass of water
• eat­ing a cookie instead of drink­ing a glass of water
• the above-mentioned things I’ve cho­sen not to bother with learn­ing to under­stand, such as basic sol­der­ing tech­nique, per­sonal finan­cial man­age­ment, Japanese polite speech and any­thing above junior-high-level kanji, why my girl­friends cry so much, how to sew, and exactly how the hell the soft­ware that sup­ports Taido/Blog actu­ally works.

A lot of the above just comes down to my per­sonal level of self-discipline, but for some­one who con­sid­ers him­self to be a stu­dent and seeker of applic­a­ble knowl­edge, the exis­tence of that last cat­e­gory really makes me uncom­fort­able. I real­ize this now, only a few days after Anthony men­tions my name in a post about “peo­ple who can think” along­side Richard Feynman. I feel that this cat­e­gory exists, in part, because I’m aware that there are other peo­ple whose knowl­edge I can employ with­out hav­ing to develop my own. But can we really rent under­stand­ing? I would ven­ture not.

Willful Ignorance In Taido

Of course, this ques­tion is also applic­a­ble to Taido. How often do we sim­ply take at face value the basic skills and con­cepts that make up our art? Too often, I think. I had a dis­cus­sion after the Tama Taikai last week­end with Watanabe Sensei from the Takushoku Uni Taido Club about rea­sons for block­ing at jodan rather than chu­dan in sen­taizuki. We dis­cussed this for about ten min­utes as we ate and drank. I’m not try­ing to make myself sound like an intel­lec­tual badass, but I won­der how many peo­ple actu­ally have taken the time to con­sider where to block in sen­tai and why. And there are thou­sands of such details about Taido (40 years’ worth of devel­op­ment) which we could ben­e­fit from analyzing.

Now I’m not sug­gest­ing that we should make life hell on our instruc­tors by ques­tion­ing every detail of every move­ment they try to teach us. What I’m really say­ing is that we should con­sider these things for our­selves rather than sim­ply rely­ing on the knowl­edge we receive from oth­ers to bring us true under­stand­ing. Perhaps it’s impos­si­ble to think deeply about every detail, and I’m not sug­gest­ing that it’s nec­es­sary or desir­able. Much of the time spent in attempt­ing such an exer­cise would be bet­ter spent actu­ally prac­tic­ing move­ments. However, it must be said that the more we prac­tice var­i­ous modes of thought, the more effi­cient and effec­tive we become in apply­ing them to var­i­ous prob­lems and ideas.

So after spend­ing ten min­utes this week dis­cussing one seem­ingly very spe­cific issue about sen­taizuki, I have learned one thing, yes, but I have also improved my capa­bil­ity to learn sim­i­lar things. In dis­sect­ing the rea­sons for block­ing at a cer­tain level in a cer­tain tech­nique, I added to my set of men­tal tools. Specifically, I’ve increased my under­stand­ing of the entire sen­tai fam­ily of move­ment and of block­ing tech­nique. Both of these could poten­tially be applied to any num­ber of appli­ca­tions in Taido.

So I guess the point of this whole post is just to ask you to be aware of those aspects of your Taido prac­tice of which you are engag­ing in will­ful igno­rance. Maybe spend a few min­utes think­ing about how that affects your expe­ri­ence of Taido and con­tri­bu­tion to Taido. Of course, any value judg­ments are yours to make. I’m sim­ply ask­ing you to con­sider it. And now I’m off to learn more about my blog­ging software.