There is a quote by John Greenleaf Whittier, the American Quaker poet, which goes:
“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.”
I’m sure we’ve all thought it at one time or another. “If only I hadn’t done this,” or “If only I had done that, or done it differently”. That poem was written in 1856 and is a nineteenth century version of the twenty-first century truism, “Live every day as if it were your last.”
Which is, of course, a nonsense. If you lived as if you were going to die tomorrow, you could rob a bank, kill your worst enemy or run off with your neighbour’s husband or wife. It’s usually attached to those inspirational posters you see hanging on the walls of offices, featuring someone scaling a sheer cliff, surfing or base-jumping. It seems to be used as a call to live a life fuelled by, and filled with, adrenaline.
Now there is another, more Buddhist way of looking at it. Indeed, there is a whole fable attached to it with which you are probably familiar:
A man is being chased by a tiger. He runs until he reaches the edge of a cliff. The tiger is still behind him, so he climbs down a vine. The tiger reaches the top of the cliff and paces back and forth, snarling with hunger. Halfway down the cliff, hanging onto the vine, he sees another tiger below him, also pacing back and forth, licking its chops. As he’s hanging there, two mice come out and start gnawing on the vine. He tries to shoo them away, but they won’t go.
If he climbs back up, the tiger will surely devour him, but if he stays where he is then if the fall doesn’t kill him the other tiger certainly will! The slender vine begins to give way, and death is imminent. Just then he notices, growing out of the face of the cliff in front of her, a wild strawberry. He picks it and pops it into his mouth. How sweet it tastes.
I think this is a better way to live every day as if it were your last – indeed every moment as if it were your last. By paying attention. And we spend an awful lot of time paying attention, not to the present, but to the past and the future.
Again, this is reflected in another Buddhist teaching – in fact, the first of the four fundamental Buddhist teachings, the Life is Suffering. Many people interpret this as a bad thing, but the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron reframes it in a more positive way, and poetic way, in her book “The Wisdom of No Escape”:
The first noble truth recognises that we (also) change like the weather, we ebb and flow like the tides, we wax and wane like the moon. We [her emphasis] do that, and there’s no reason to resist it. If we resist it, the reality and vitality of life becomes misery, a hell.
So what’s the point of regretting what we haven’t done or things we did in the past. We can’t change them, and to continue to reflect on them, to obsess about them, will only make us sad.
Why am I writing this? Because last time I was in Santa Cruz I was talking to Linda Holiday, 6th dan Chief Instructor of Aikido of Santa Cruz, and a student of Motomichi Anno sensei. I was looking a younger people practising … all right, now I’m sixty-one most of the people I see practising are younger, but these were people I guess were in their early twenties. And I said I felt I’d come to aikido comparatively late in life, at the age of about twenty-eight, and I wished I’d started much earlier; I felt like I’d lost at least ten years.
Linda pointed to an older man, clearly a beginner, who was practising and said “He’s sixty and he’s only just started. You should be grateful for all the time you’ve had studying aikido that he hasn’t.”
This re-framing is very important. It is inevitable that things are going to go wrong in our lives, no matter how careful we are, no matter how decent, kind and honest we feel we are, life is going to treat us unfairly. In that respect, Life is Suffering and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it, unless we stop wishing for “what might have been”.
Everything that has happened in our lives has brought us to the place we are now, and if it’s a place where we can feel content, then we should be grateful for all the things we didn’t do, or got wrong, in our life.
And if we’re not happy with where we are, again there is some very good Buddhist advice, this time from the Dalai Lama. He says:
“If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it’s not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.”
Obviously, although the principle is a very good, but it’s very hard to put into practice. One way to do it, is to do what the man being chased by a tiger did, which is to pay attention. In my aikido practice, I shouldn’t be planning how the technique will end; I shouldn’t be complaining because I can’t pick up a technique as fast as the eighteen-year old next to me, or regretting that I can’t go to a seminar in Belgium because I have to do something with my family.
I should be grateful for thirty-odd years of aikido, I should be grateful that my bad knees make me think around how to do a technique more efficiently, and more than anything, I should be grateful I have a loving family that have supported over those thirty-odd years in my practice of aikido.

I was watching the comedian Reginald D. Hunter’s documentary series “Songs of the South, which was a trip into his childhood, looking at the music of the Southern States of the United States from Kentucky to Louisiana. I was particularly interested in an interview he had with a zydeco musician called Geno Delafose.
Hunter asked him to explain the difference between certain types of Cajun music, and Delafose said words to the effect that it was like Cajun cooking. There was dirty rice – which is basically white rice which gets a “dirty” colour from being cooked with small pieces chicken liver or giblets, green bell peppers, celery and onions, and spiced with cayenne and black pepper.
And then there were the people who added more salt to their rice; but whether it was dirty rice or salty rice, it was all still rice. It was just that some people liked dirty rice and some people liked salty rice.
And of course it struck me that people think the same about aikido.
Considering that we practise an art with the word “harmony” in it, there are endless disagreements, heated discussions, and knock-down-drag-out fights about which type of aikido is best.
A lot of this debate ranges around pre- and post-war aikido.
1938 is regarded as the heart of the golden years of Aikido Founder Morihei Ueshiba’s Kobukan Dojo, known as “Hell Dojo” for the severity of its training. There were approximately twenty uchideshi (live-in students) in the dojo at that time and they trained from five in the morning until nine in the evening. The most famous student from this time is probably Gozo Shioda, who began training in 1932 and stayed on as an uchideshi for 7 years.
After the war he went on to found the Yoshinkan style of aikido which emphasizes self-defence applications and has a reputation as a tough, systematic martial art which is taught to Japanese riot police.
At that time O-Sensei was ensconced in Iwama, and although he later started travelling and teaching again he did not teach at the Hombu Dojo in Japan on a day-to-day basis. When he was there his instruction often centred on philosophical subjects. It was Koichi Tohei and Kisshomaru Ueshiba who are the persons most responsible for the technical content and development of aikido within the Aikikai Hombu system in the post-war period, when aikido seems to have been characterised by a “softer”, more flowing style.
It has been argued that this emphasis on aikido as “The Way of Peace” was a necessary in order to overcome General MacArthur’s ban of the martial arts after the war, but regardless socio-political reasons, people who study aikido seem to fall into one of two camps – hard aikido or soft aikido.
There are those who insist that aikido should primarily be a means of self-defence. They are fond of quoting Ueshiba’s dictum, “My technique is 70 percent atemi (striking) and 30 percent nage (throwing),” which is echoed and expanded on by Shioda:
“The founder, Ueshiba Sensei, said, In a real battle, atemi is seventy percent, technique is thirty percent … Atemi is virtually omitted in Aikido training on the ground that a preliminary blow should not become a matter of predominant concern. However, there are quite a few cases in which the meaning of a technique becomes incomprehensible if the attendant atemi is left out.”
There are others like George Ledyard of Aikido Eastside, who studies under Mitsugi Saotome sensei, who argue that the purpose of atemi is generally a means to facilitate another technique. I was told to refer to this kind of atemi as “taking the mind” as it distracts the opponent, shifting his attention to the strike instead of the technique that is being performed. Ledyard argues that:
1. A strike that is itself the technique and designed to cause damage, as in striking arts such as karate, boxing and types of kung fu is contrary to Aikido principles as its intent usually involves serious injury to the opponent and is only to be used as a last resort, and;
2. Atemi based on causing pain is unreliable against a determined attacker, who will expect to get hit, but just ignore it to continue with their attack.
So the argument would go that too much attention to atemi takes the practitioner’s attention away from the key element of aikido, which is well-performed technique. And one of the foremost proponent of getting the basics right was Morihiro Saito shihan. He placed particular emphasis on the relationship between the armed and unarmed aspects of the art, leading as it does to an understanding of ma-ai (combatative distance), developing good posture and a strong centre as well as strengthening the arms and shoulders.
Saito was committed to carrying on Ueshiba’s legacy, following and preserving Ueshiba’s teachings as he had learned them. I can recall at seminars he usually had a flipbook of photos of O’Sensei, and when he was emphasising a particular position he expected us to take in a technique, he would produce a photograph of Ueshiba in the same position.
You could argue that Saito occupies the middle ground with his emphasis on correct technique, but even he believed that strikes were a “vital element” of aikido.
This brings us to the third aspect of atemi that George Ledyard highlights; what he calls “the not striking of striking”.
Essentially the strike is just fast enough that the attacker cannot avoid or block it, but is just slow enough that the attacker can only respond to it by breaking his posture and taking a fall in order not to be hit. It can give the impression that the attacker is throwing himself, but if one tried it with an untrained partner it result in that partner being hit. Ledyard argues that it is the timing and intention that differentiates the “Not Striking of Striking” and “Strike as a Technique itself”.
And of course this leads to what might be called the “ultra-soft” styles of aikido which involve no-touch throws as a result of the manipulation of ki. There are those who would argue that a genuine no-touch throw is a result of good technique and possibly George Ledyard’s “not striking strike”, but there are others who insist that it is something more. And that debate will go on for as long as aikido practitioners get together.
In a book I have referred to before, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the author, Robert M. Pirsig says that even if Quality is not defined, we all know what is good Quality and what is not. And I think it would be fair to say that after practising aikido for a while and being exposed to a variety of teachers, we can make judgements about what we think is good or bad aikido.
Some of us like our aikido salty, and some of us don’t, but it’s all aikido.