17 January 2003: Learning

School started this week.  Flash class Monday night, crowded, looks like it's going to be tough.  Photoshop class Wednesday afternoon, looks like it's going to be fun and inspiring.  Tonight I've got a film class - not a film-making class (that's next year sometime), just a Humanities-type watch-films-and-write-about-them class.  I can put up with exactly one non-hands-on class a semester.

The Wednesday tae kwon do class at the Berkeley YMCA meets in the same room as my Wednesday night aikido class, and ends at the same time my class is scheduled to start.  There's plenty of potential friction in that sort of situation, but both groups have done a pretty good job of being friendly about it.  Lizard's been going to the tae kwon do class before the aikido class (and on other days as well) for the past year or so, and now she can kick really well and has become the person I call on when I'm demonstrating techinques against kicks.   The Wednesday tae kwon do class now fits perfectly into my schedule, right in between my Photoshop class two blocks away and my aikido class in the same room.  And it's free for me, since I work at the Y.  So I decided a while ago that learning tae kwon do was part of what I was going to do to get in shape this year.  I went to my first class last week.  On the same day, with no prior discussion between the two of us about it, the tae kwon do instructor began attending my Wednesday aikido class.   We both had a great time, and this week I had my second tae kwon do class and he had his second aikido class.  I told him that we only needed to own two belts between us, one white and one black, and we could just hand them off to each other in between classes.  He liked that.  He's a good guy, and in this journal I'll call him Sir, because in tae kwon do one calls the instructor sir, but I always forget to do so in class.  The aikido habits are deeply ingrained. He gives an instruction, and everyone exclaims "Yes, sir!" except for me; I reflexively come out with a sharp Japanese "Hai!"  He doesn't seem to mind, so far; I guess he knows that the spirit is the same.

Tae kwon do seems to be first and foremost a kicking art.  I suck at kicking, at the moment.   It's fun being good at something, but it's also exciting to be a beginner at something, to get back in touch with the feeling of being really, really bad at something and being thrilled every time one manages to do something even remotely like what one was trying to do.  It boggles and horrifies me that so many people are so self-important that they can't enjoy that sort of thing.  It's the number one reason that people drop out of aikido, or any other martial art, early on (sometimes so early on that it's not technically dropping out, because they never actually start). 

After two years of working with children, teaching them to do something that is very hard for them, I have concluded that this sort of anxiety, this ridiculous indulgence in self-importance and self-condemnation, this self-sabotage through perfectionism, is not a natural condition.  It is damage that one acquires in childhood, through the evil and incompetence of parents, teachers, and other adults.  It is a qliphotic pattern passed on to each subsequent generation, and, like most such patterns, the ones who inflict it are those who most suffer from it themselves.

You can take the fun out of anything.  All you have to do is tell yourself that you're no good unless you do it right.  Doing this to a child is just as easy as doing it to yourself.  You don't even have to say anything.  Children can read minds much better than most adults can. 

One of the things I'm most praised for at work is my ability to work with kids who are crippled by confidence issues.  I can do this because I learned aikido, because I'm learning tae kwon do, because Zann and Lexicat taught me to do cartwheels when I was already in my thirties, because I started college at the age of 33, because at Wolfina's birthday party this past weekend some of the guys were jumping up and grabbing a roofbeam and I'm a terrible high-jumper and couldn't quite reach it but I tried about forty times and was still smiling at the end.  I was not always like this; it took practice.

Speaking of Zann, I heard back from her.  She is well, and doing good work.  Touching people's lives.  Working with teenage girls.  She is one who is good for children, one who is a master of this thing I have been learning, this ability to not merely teach the young, but to help them to rediscover the joy of learning, the joy of doing things because, as the Doctor put it (Suess, that is), these things are fun, and fun is good.

I have to go outside now.  There are birds singing.