When I started this blog a few months ago I promised myself that I would write a thousand words a week. This doesn’t seem much when you remember that Jack London wrote one thousand words by hand every morning.
About writing he once said: “The three great things are: Good Health; Work; and a Philosophy of Life. I may add, nay, must add, a fourth—Sincerity. Without this, the other three are without avail. With it you may cleave to greatness and sit among the giants.”
Now I don’t claim to be sitting among giants, but given that I have retired from working life, my health is good! And certainly blogging like this has helped me pull together a lot of the ideas I’ve acquired over my life into some sort of philosophy. And as a result of that, everything I’ve written is what I believe or I know to be true – at the time, because if aikido teaches anything it is that we should be open to change.
But back to the blog, and already you might be getting some idea of why the title is what it is.
To start with I was quite concerned that I wouldn’t have enough to write about. The first piece I wrote probably took a week from the initial idea to the first draft and the re-writes to get it sounding close to how it was in my head. And when I was finished, I instantly panicked that I wouldn’t know what to write about next.
I felt like the New York Times columnist David Brooks who said in an interview:
“I once had lunch with a prominent American columnist – I won’t say who – and I asked: ‘What’s your next column about?’ He pulled out an index card from his wallet, and the next 13 columns were on there. I wanted to take my knife and ram it into his neck.”
Because, he said, he describes himself as someone who finds it hard to generate opinions on demand.
Strangely, an idea appeared, as a result of the first blog, or from something I read or heard, and the second one was much easier to write. And before I’d finished it the third one was already shaping up in my mind.
The author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig, describes a similar thing happening in the generating of scientific hypotheses:
… what might seem to be the hardest part of scientific work, was invariably the easiest … even when his experimental work was at a dead-end in every conceivable way, he knew that if he just sat down and muddled about it long enough, sure enough, another hypothesis would come along.
He then goes on to use this phenomenon to attack the whole scientific methodology. He quotes Einstein as saying, “Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest”, and interprets this as Einstein saying absolute truth is a function of time, which he does not regard as very scientific.
Personally, I think it all comes back to choice, which is something I discussed in a previous blog. When I started writing these blogs, my choices were fairly limited. I knew I had to write it, it had to have some content which people would want to discuss, and I had to finish it within a certain timeframe.
And that is much like learning aikido (or anything else for that matter). I can’t remember the first technique I was taught, maybe ikkyo, but I was shown a beginning, middle and end. And probably for the next twenty minutes that’s what we practised; perhaps the attack was varied, but it was ikkyo over and over, and I certainly wasn’t very good. I forgot what to do at the beginning, which foot goes where, or stopped dead in the middle because I didn’t know what to do next, and my finish wasn’t much better!
But over time, I got better at ikkyo; particularly if we learned a new technique and then went back to ikkyo. I was able to make comparisons, and start to see why this time my foot had to go here, and with the other technique it had to go there.
When you’re first faced with a tsuki attack, you tend to freeze (at least I did); you watch the fist coming in and forget all about technique. But there also comes a time where you seem to know too much and you freeze – you don’t know whether to do kote gaeshi, irimi nage or ikkyo, and consequently you do nothing.
But there comes a point where all of that knowledge in your head comes together, and you find that you have all the time in the world to pick the technique you want. Rather like Einstein searching for the right hypothesis, at a given moment out of all conceivable techniques a single one will prove itself absolutely superior to the rest.
I found this expansion of choice when I was writing happened when I relaxed; or as Robert Pirsig said, “if he just sat down and muddled about it long enough (relaxed) … another hypothesis would come along.”
Presumably this is why the New York Times columnist found it so hard. He was being paid to produce two controversial columns a week and he had to deliver. No one is going to fire me if I don’t produce a blog one week, or send death threats if they disagree with me (I hope)! It’s very hard to relax under those kinds of circumstances.
But back to the title of this piece, and how it applies to my aikido – and maybe yours. As I’m writing, all of these choices are appearing to me about what to write next, and I have to jot those down in a notebook. But at the same time I find that the point I’m trying to make at the beginning has often changed by the end – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, and occasionally completely.
And those are aiki moments that I experience sometimes and would like to experience more often. When I start a technique and at the end I find it’s something different, and I think, “What happened there?” So I go back over everything, and I can see all those moments in the technique where choices were made, and “a single one proved itself superior to all the rest.”
I want to practise Einstein aikido!!