4th Kyu Essay

This essay has it's own preface. What I remember about this one however, is that it came at a time when I was been hit by the similarities of many of the teaching of budo.

the essay

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Stand in the Middle of a Teeter-Totter

Recently I attended a visitation for a young girl who had died in a car accident. Being a parent of two young girls, I found the experience particularly difficult. As I drove away from the funeral home, I became aware of a very strong appreciation for life that I am hit with immediately following such loss. It usually manifests as a deeper commitment to be a good father and husband. In that moment, I experienced a merging of two dualities, life and death. Duality is the great challenge in life. How do we reconcile life and death, strong and weak, hard and soft, or compassion and detachment?

In training, there are countless opportunities to encounter dualities. Hard and soft, or rather, tense and relaxed is a common one. Our goal is most definitely to be relaxed in our practice; but, with so much to be attentive to, this seems impossible. Robert Mustard Sensei noticed this in his past visits to our dojo, calling the lot of us a "bunch of gorillas". Showing some sympathy for this plight, Mustard Sensei also reminded us that without tense, we could never know relaxed. Although it was said in an almost off handed manner, that simple observation is the core teaching for anyone who seeks to study the way seriously.

In training, we will continually move between extremes. In our first attempts at Jiyu waza (freestyle) we will sometimes move too fast, and at other times not fast enough. As our pins develop we find a balance between a weak and ineffective pin and the arm wrenchers that test our training friendships. Most clearly we can see it in weapons practice. There it seems more difficult to get that correct distance. Close enough to breathe reality into the martial nature of the movement, but far enough to prevent injury. This interval is called Ma ai.

The translation of Ma ai is "proper distance". Ma means distance, and Ai means harmony. This is the same Ai as in Aikido (The way of harmony with energy). Harmony and balance seems to be the core goal of both budo and life. We want it now. That's our problem, fault, whatever.

What we must keep in mind is that we need to know and experience both sides before we can ever have harmony. Fast and slow, hard and soft, or life and death are all part of the same reality. We should not begrudge either, or we will never have Ai.