People talk a lot about patience in the martial arts, about patiently waiting for an opening in an opponent’s defence during combat, saying of their next grading “I know I’m not ready now, but I’m prepared to wait”, or the patience an instructor might have with a particularly slow student.

As I see it, the danger is if patience is regarded as the sacrifice of the fulfillment of our immediate desires or needs in order to do what is necessary to produce a desired outcome in the future.  Patience then becomes a focus on the future and a neglect of what is happening now.  And if the martial arts teach us one thing, it is to be present in the Now.

There is a famous Zen story called Pot Lid Zen, the essence of which is this:

A young man went to a great teacher called Banzo to learn swordsmanship.

“How long will it take me to learn swordsmanship?” he asked.

“The rest of your life,” was the reply.

“I can’t wait that long. I will accept any hardship, and will devote myself completely to the study of swordsmanship.”

“In that case, ten years.”

“What if I train twice as hard?” tried the young man.

“In that case, thirty years.”

“Why is that? First you say ten then thirty years. I will do anything to learn, but I don’t have that much time.”

“In that case, seventy years.”

In the end the young man agreed to work as long as it took, and do anything he was told. However, for the first year all Banzo had him do was to perform simple physical tasks such as chopping wood. After a year of this he demanded that Banzo teach him some swordsmanship. Banzo merely insisted that he chop wood.

He returned to the woodpile, inwardly furious, but while he was chopping Banzo crept up behind him and struck him painfully with a wooden sword. “You want to learn swordsmanship, but you can’t even dodge a stick,” he said.

From that day on Banzo would creep up on him and attack him with a wooden sword. As his senses became heightened, Banzo changed tactics. Now he attacked, even when the young man was asleep. For the next four years he did not have a moment’s rest from the fear of unexpected attack.

One day, when he was stirring some food on the fire, Banzo crept up and attacked him by surprise. Without thinking the young man fended off the blow with the lid of the pot without taking his mind off stirring the food. That night Banzo wrote out his certificate of mastery.

 

The young man’s success was achieved not by deferring instant gratification for some reward down the road.  It was achieved through continual practice in the now without thought for the future.

I also like to think that when he finally received his certificate of mastery, the young man did not think he had arrived.  He continued to practise, improving his skills and expanding his knowledge.

The martial arts in general and aikido in particular, are not a means to an end.  As Eckhart Tolle says “When work is a means to an end, it cannot be of high quality.”

Patience implies judgement on the part of the person being patient.  “I’ve been very patient”, “I’m running out of patience” are phrases that we are all familiar with.  We’ve either used them, or had them used on us.  They mean that a standard we are judging against, or being judged against, is close to not being met.  It brings us back to the idea of some desired outcome.  Margaret Thatcher once said “I am very patient, provided I get my own way in the end.”

So perhaps we need a new word.  Acceptance is too passive.  There is a suggestion of agreement with what is happening; it’s one step away from resigned acceptance of a difficult or unpleasant situation.

It is important to be more than simply stoical.  Stoicism can help – when your practice is going badly it is useful to remember that it will get better.  And when it is going well, it is also useful to remind yourself that there will be times will be times when it will be terrible.  It is a reminder not to be caught up in an emotional response to what is happening now, because emotions are temporary: one day up, the next day down.  But to me, this is not enough.  One doesn’t want to be simply “toughing it out” when things are bad.  We shouldn’t want fixate on a future where things will get better or worse.

So I would suggest Openness.  There is no judgement in openness, but neither is there acceptance.  It acknowledges a situation and deals with it as it is.  The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who linked patience with openness, said it this way:

“ … try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very   foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

In this way you are responding to what is happening Now.  In the same way that you shouldn’t force an aikido technique to make it work but, responding to what is happening to uke and yourself, allow the technique to happen at the right moment.  Nor should you cling to the feeling of that technique and try to reproduce the next time.  Each time it will be different, some good, some bad, and we should remain open to them all.

But a much wiser person than I said it much more simply:

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”

Winnie-the-Pooh.