In one of the last posts, I said I’ll come back to the idea of the “fortunate random thing”. I’m talking about the way I started practicing Aikido. It seemed a fortunate coincidence to have a colleague at work who has been practicing Aikido for over a year when I went with him for the first time at the dojo.
After deciding to start attending Aikido classes regularly (and it didn’t take me more than 2 or 3 sessions to reach this conclusion), I started thinking about this. Never mind my background as a primarily sedentary person and my laziness. I mean… why on Earth did I choose to get interested in Aikido in the first place? Why did I start reading on this topic and seeking movie clips? Why didn’t I keep making fun of this colleague, with the others? How come I was the only one of them to react in a positive manner, i.e. be open minded and try at least to understand what I was laughing at, with the other co-workers?
What I’m trying to point out is that, through life, you get lots of occasions to do or to get something, yet you don’t value each of them. Some might not interest you. For instance, if tomorrow my colleagues would go to a techno music concert and they’d ask me if I’m coming too, I definitely won’t. Because there’s this disinterest from my part for this particular event.
Thinking about this, I tried to get straight in my head the reasons that people generally have in mind when taking on or not taking on an ‘offer’ that arises from a particular conjuncture of events in one’s life. It’s always difficult to give out a correct judgment on such a slippery topic; so no wonder I didn’t reach a satisfactory conclusion.
In the meantime, however, I was analyzing the transformations that started to take place… on me, since I started training. One thing in particular struck me.
I think it was about 2 months after joining the dojo that I felt like I needed extra classes (apart from what I was doing at home); by then, I was only attending the classes 2 days per week, in the morning, before work. I didn’t feel like going there in the evening because of two main reasons: first, it would have been uncomfortable for my schedule (I would have had to leave from work early) and second, I knew that far more people were participating in the evening classes and I didn’t feel particularly prepared for that (from what I heard, there were even former or actual police men participating and I was not really eager to make a fool out of myself, I thought I should reach a decent level first – anyway, it later turned out that I was, yet again, wrong). So the problem remained, I wanted to go to the dojo more often, so for about two months I joined the weekend kids’ classes, knowing I would double benefit from that: get some basic stuff right and in the same time build up more endurance (wow, I never imagined a kids’ class can be so intense; at least that’s how they’re run in the dojo I train in). Here I was right, participating in kids’ classes helped.
But sooner than I consciously realized it, something else had happened too. Some of the classes had a particular emphasis on single practice, so most of the time, while following indications and practicing what the instructor had us do, I was merely an observer. In other words, I had a real good insight on the training as a learning process and in particular – my adult’s learning process versus a child’s learning process. While I must admit that I never really liked kids and that this particular topic never actually interested me a few years ago, in the late time I’ve been trying to grasp on children’s psychology and mental and personality development since it turns out that my mother, in her mid 40s, and her husband, in his mid 50s, don’t seem to be in complete control of their 3 children’s education. Anyway, they’re outnumbered, that’s for sure, haha. Although the age difference between me and my 3 half-brothers is big (14, 16 and 18 years respectively), in the late time, since I started visiting them more often, it turns out that I’m the one who understands their mind process better; it’s easy, since I’m younger than my mother and than my step-father, I’m more prone to recall what I did as a child in a particular situation or which ‘methods’ worked or didn’t work on me.
So getting back to my observations on a child’s learning process taken from participating a few times in the kids’ class: I realized just to what a huge extent an adult’s learning process is diminished and made difficult by having the kid’s intuition slowly turning into adult abstract reasoning. Growing up, you tend to leave most part of your intuition and ingenuity behind and start blocking yourself with “rational reasoning”. A pity… this is why it’s best to start anything at a young age – learning a foreign language, playing an instrument, practicing a sport etc.
While getting a little bit frustrated over this discovery and tackling the problem from all sides, I realized yet another thing: subconsciously I was trying to “reverse translate” all the information I was gathering. Meaning that, if we were to accept the “intuition turning into abstract and awkward reasoning as we grow up” theory, I was annoyed at the thought of trying to re-discover everything that for a child seems natural: movement, relaxation, breathing, center etc. So I was subconsciously in the middle of a process like “Now, let’s see, how would I have done this if I were their age? How did I use do do or see this when I was little?”.
And here’s the strange part: as doing so, lots of memories from my childhood emerged, some of them with plenty of details even. This surprised me because, while I can’t say I’ve got an exceptional memory, I’m glad I at least have a decent one, but there are some things that you just don’t find the time to think about or to remember, such as what you did as a child in X situation. So getting these memories “pop up” now and then, the “thread” I’ve been looking for revealed.
It’s like the little voices in your head that you don’t even know of, until a certain context is created and then the voice makes itself heard and you’re surprised it’s been there all along and you had no clue about it.
One of these particular ‘little voices’ that I was able to identify was the memory of a big disappointment I had as a child when my grandmother, after talking to the mother of one of my class mates in junior school, wanted to convince my parents to get me to train in Judo or in Karate. That girl started Taekwondo when she was 6 or 7 and she was indeed very special: bright, fast spirited, funny and with an ethical code that is not at all common among children. Well, of course, my parents disapproved, saying that I was not to spend my valuable study time doing something as dangerous and as ‘primary’ as Judo or Karate. I was indeed disappointed then but soon I moved on. I didn’t insist too much on it since I didn’t actually know what martial arts were all about, I just had a general “Cool!” idea about the whole thing and I was maybe too small to be affected by such an unimportant failure.
HAH! And just when you thought… not that it was over, but when you thought that the issue never actually occurred… WHAM! It pops up. This was some kind of click that I heard in my mind. I finally realized that an apparently small, child-like frustration got to reside in the profound levels of my being and waited there, unseen and benign, until the right moment came.
I must have been around 8 or 9 when that episode happened. Funny, eh? :)
Now getting back to the idea from the beginning of this post, on occasions that you get from time to time and that you take or you don’t take advantage of, my abstract rational mind would say that I should have been more prone to reconsider conscious decisions, that I took by myself, when I was fully aware of the implications. Such as the big turning point during high school when I abandoned my dream of becoming a biologist because I desperately hated chemistry and when I chose computer science instead.
So this settles it. Choosing, apparently so “easy”, to begin training in Aikido with full commitment was not at all a “random thing”, it was the result of an unobserved but deep childhood frustration. But I can’t argue on the “fortunate thing” side – it was indeed fortunate to have this chance come across, to have this colleague to tell me about Aikido.
Who knows… many people say that everything that happens, happens for a good reason, and there’s no such thing as randomness (or that randomness is only apparent). Maybe there’s an answer for this too, but… ah! too many answers can shake you off too badly.
Nu cerceta aceste legi, / Căci eşti nebun de le-nţelegi!
says the poet. (Approximate translation: “Don’t look into these laws, / For you’re mad if you understand them!”)
