This is the flip side to my last blog, the yin to its yang. Or perhaps it demonstrates how completely aikido has permeated my life.
Often I will find myself reading something, watching television or having a conversation with someone and once again the light bulb will go on. It happens so frequently now that I carry a little notebook with me to jot down a couple of words that will help me remember later what had caught my attention and how it might apply to aikido.
Once again, I’ll give you a couple of recent examples and one older one:
1. I was reading an article in a magazine about the satirical cartoonist Wally Fawkes, and something he said made me note down “satire – irimi”. That was enough for me to be able to come back to the article later and pick out what I wanted. Fawkes illustrated the cartoon strip and it was written by the infamous jazz musician George Melly. Sometimes, Melly’s satirical barbs became a little too sharp and Fawkes would say to him: “Don’t overdo the satire, George. The best way of jumping on a target is to appear to be walking past it.”
Initially I thought the phrase pretty accurately describes how to do a good irimi-nage, but on reflection it is a good general description of how to perform aikido.
Webster’s dictionary defines satire as “a way of using humour to show someone or something is foolish, weak, bad, etc.”, but Jonathan Swift said it better: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”
The best satire is a rapier not a bludgeon, it is subtle, and the best aikido techniques are the same. Ideally uke shouldn’t be aware of what you’ve done until he hits the floor. It’s easy to overdo aikido; we all get carried away with an energetic practice, but what we really want to learn is how to appear to be doing nothing.
After all, if aikido has a self-defence aspect surely it will be most effective if our aggressor is unaware that we are going to do anything.

2. The other note I want to talk about is one I made because I caught a piece on a radio news programme about an auction of old musical instruments. One of them was a very old clavichord, one of the oldest keyboards in existence. The presenter was asking a musician what it was like to play it. She said it gave an insight into why composers wrote music the way they did. With half an ear on what she said next I scribbled down “clavichord limits throwing.” She went on to explain that there were things clavichords could not do back then and composers had to write to the limits of the machine.
It seems to me that this can be applied to the way we perform our techniques. Sometimes we get so fixated on how we do techniques that we forget who we are doing them on. Some people have stiffer joints than others, and yet we still attempt to do shiho nage on them as if we were practising with someone who is almost double-jointed. We feel the tension in uke, and yet we keep going because “This is how you do the technique” and we don’t stop until we hear them shout out in pain.
When we practise, we are the composers, aikido is our music and uke is like that old clavichord. We must be aware of what they can and can’t do and adjust our technique accordingly. This is one of the reasons why it is a good idea to change partners when doing the same technique, and where possible, to practise with children. They are delicate, their bones are soft, they are not yet fully-formed and are easily damaged; also, they are not pre-conditioned like us adults and do not fall where they are supposed to. Unless you are sensitive to them, it can be very easy to hurt them.
After all, when practising, is it such a bad thing to regard uke as a precious musical instrument that you want to play to their limits without damaging them? Just as there would be no music with instruments to play, so there would be no aikido with uke to practise with.

3. When, against the odds, Steve Davis beat John Higgins to make it through to the quarter finals of the 2010 Snooker World Championship, he said something very interesting in the post-match interview. All young snooker players are told to keep their head still when making a s shot, because when you move your head you move your spine and thus your whole posture which disrupts your cue action. Experienced players usually do this automatically, but Davis said a friend had texted him after watching him on TV to warn him that he’d developed a bad habit of moving his head on a shot, so during the tournament, and in this match in particular, Davis kept focused on this very basic point of technique, rather than all the other tiny things that affect cue action.
It got me thinking about the how way we move our head affects our aikido. Balancing on top of the spine and held in place by a complex system of muscles and ligaments, the head has a centre of gravity all its own. When attempting to break uke’s balance (kuzushi) ultimately we are trying to pull the spine out of alignment by destroying the head’s centre of gravity. And at the same time we are trying to maintain the stability of our own head and upright structure.
It reminded me once again that there are two people in any technique, and my first thought should be about my own stability, before I start trying to interfere with anyone else’s!

So there you have it. It turns out that everything is aikido, or to slightly misquote the teacher I mentioned earlier:
“When you’re doing aikido, you’re not doing aikido. When you’re not doing aikido, you’re doing aikido.”