Although this was said to me over quarter of a century ago, I still remember it, even if I can’t remember who it was who said it.
“Are you coming training on Friday?”
I probably agreed, but there was something about the question that didn’t sit right with me and for a long time I couldn’t think what it was. It wasn’t the question itself; the very idea that I wouldn’t be training. Finally I realised that it was the word “training” itself.

I was not what would call a sporty child. For me, it was reading books not playing football, writing not running and certainly not training. Training is what you do in sports, and I didn’t do sports. That was for “the flannelled fools at the wickets or the muddied oafs at the goals” to quote Rudyard Kipling.

This is, I suppose, what attracted me to, and continues to fascinate me about aikido. It is not a sport. It is an art, an art which I practise. I don’t train to be faster than someone or to be stronger or better than they are. I practise the same way, and for the same reason, that an artist paints. I do it to express something I feel inside. I want to interpret the internal externally.

Aristotle said “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” So the artist doesn’t paint what he sees, he paints what he feels. In this way he takes what cannot be perceived by looking and makes it visible. This is O’Sensei’s “profound truth that the manifest and hidden are one.”
The artist, Michelangelo, writing of sculpture, expressed it this way:
“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

Aikido helps us to do this through technique. Of course, in the same way that Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso all used basically the same materials and yet their interpretation of what they saw was completely different, if you put twelve aikidoka in one dojo they will perform twelve different types of shiho-nage, for example – the essence will be the same, but the form will be different.

I like to think of aikidoka practising together as musicians. They practise for hours and hours to improve, so that when they perform they are (hopefully) in harmony. Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young said of their practice:
“Our voices had range and pinpoint control, which allowed us to locate the tension in the harmonies. We experimented with melodic dissonance, modal chords and irregular arpeggios, using flexible notes that combined in unusual ways.”

It’s the same with aikido; once you have mastered, or begun to understand the basics, then you start experimenting, and ultimately, like CSNY you ultimately find your own unique style of aikido which will hopefully be harmonious. Interestingly, when Nash took up painting he found that there were similarities between art and music:
“Having in paintbrushes in my hand, I discovered, was the same energy as having a guitar in my hand. Just a different tool.”

Of course, aikido can be regarded as self-defence only, and there is nothing wrong with this; but I do think that it gives a restricted view of the art if you only think this way. The techniques themselves are very effective, and have been tested on the battlefield. O’Sensei himself, and aikido masters such as Koichi Tohei and Kazuo Chiba had wartime experience, and the Yoshinkan Aikido of Gozo Shioda is taught to the Tokyo Riot Police. The Dalai Lama highlights the problem of this one-dimensional view:
I’m sure all of us agree that we need to overcome violence, but we first need to examine whether it has any value. From a strictly practical perspective, on certain occasions violence appears to be useful. We can solve a problem quickly by force. But this success is often at the expense of the rights and welfare of others. Although one problem has been solved, the seed of another has been planted.

At the age of 61, I am looking ahead to the next ten or twenty years of practice that I hopefully have left. I cannot condition my body in those ways any more, so I must look for deeper forms of practice. But as an instructor I can see a danger here that I have to be careful of. If my students copy me too carefully, or I try to make them too like me in my instruction, they will end up practising like an old man. The adjustments I have made to my technique to accommodate my painful knees or arthritic toes aren’t necessary for young students.

When young people start Aikido, or any form of martial art, they are looking for more than a discussion of whether we practice or train. They want action!
Thus, as Dave Lowry says in “Moving Towards Stillness”:
“ … budo begins with a training of the gross muscles and then advance to the education and strengthening of the smaller, finer ones and then on to conditioning of the sinews and ligaments and reflexes and nerves themselves. Attitudes, feelings and emotions are all brought into harmony in the process … and all of this occurs under the aegis of movement and struggle.”

So perhaps what I should be saying that aikido encourages us to move from training to practice over time. Irimi nage is sometimes called the thirty-year technique as it will take you thirty years to master all the subtleties of it. Ten years to learn the physical side, ten years to understand the mental side, and ten years to grasp the spiritual aspects. When we start aikido maybe we do “train”; train the muscle memories so that we can perform tenkan and tai-sabaki without thinking, so that our hands will automatically find the right place on uke’s body, but the purpose of the training must ultimately to be to move us towards the practice.