No matter how unskilled you might be, you can be sure that you’ll always be of great use at ‘fixing’ stuff, guided by others.
As a child, I used to spend many weekends and my grandfather, who is an engineer, watching and helping him “do stuff” around the house, such as mounting a new door, projecting a building a new shelf, fixing the car tape player, projecting a custom PC table with power on/off switchers for general power, scanner, printer, etc. I recall finding all these stuff fun and useful. That was when I got in touch with tools. Invaluable skills :)
Last week, Sensei announced us he’d like to start working on the dojo, which was not in an excellent state, starting with the roof, in order to prevent water infiltration. A few guys said they can help with tools and finding materials to buy and we were all asked whether we want and can help at the work, during the weekend. Yesterday (Saturday) was the day. I said I’ll come too – although I never fixed a roof before, I imagined I could be of some kind of help.
It turned out I was right. A total of 7 people (including myself) spent exactly 12 hours on re-enforcing the roof, mounting new tiles, securing them in screws, heating the tiles and pressing them, replacing some old and rusty boards with flexible and thick plastic and cleaning around.
It was one of the most fun Saturdays I ever had. Of course, you can’t understand how much fun it is to heat and press tiles on the roof of the dojo and pause for a brief second to take a sip of warm beer until you’re actually doing it, hahaha. Priceless moments… such as arranging 3 benches in line, in front of the dojo, between construction materials, arranging the boxes of pizza on them and then hearing somebody joking “Yame! Zaho!” just before we all sat down. This is a commonly heard phrase in Aikido, meaning to stop from whatever you might be doing and to pay attention to the one speaking (“Yame!“) – usually the instructor – and the request for everybody to sit down in seiza (“Zaho!“). Priceless.
(Nope, the photo above doesn’t picture us and our roof, it’s just the first ‘roof’ picture found by Google image search; it just fitted in very well.)
Apart from being helpful, you will certainly learn new skills… you know, if you ever quit your current job, you can always start over in constructions :) Apart from ‘technical’ things, you can learn invaluable stuff, such as climbing on an un-even and un-straight roof without falling, keeping your balance on the steep roof and slowly become comfortable at running on it etc.
So “I don’t know how to fix roofs” is only an excuse. If you do want to help, there will always be something that you can do. You can do more than you realize.
In my concrete case, I only found it natural to be there and help, since working around the dojo I train in is like working on something for my own house. After all, apparently the dojo is becoming my second home…
The only downside is that I won’t be able to play foosball on Monday, at work (erm… during the breaks), since my palms and fingers feel numb. Ah well, haha.
I don’t think I’ve seen your blog before. Thanks for the link. If I did see it, it doesn’t look like I added you to my links, so I’ll do that now, since you have a very nice Aikido blog. Keep up the good work!
I enjoyed reading your blog. I consider the dojo my second home/family. It sounds like you found a great dojo family.
Uchi Deshi: Thanks for the encouragement and for adding this link to your blogroll. As I’ll hopefully be “moving on”, this blog will do the same. The “Keep up the good work” goes both ways, I find it fascinating to read on what an uchi deshi regime means :)
Michele: Thanks for the comment, it seems I found indeed “a great dojo family”, as you put it. Just today I was trying to explain to my colleagues at work (who saw this entry) that the “second home” thing is not so crazy as it seems at a first glance. Alas, apparently I wasn’t successful, because they kept on bashing.