27 June 2003: A Perfect Day for Lounging

Heat wave these past few days.  It is currently 94 degrees in my apartment, with all the windows open, the blinds closed, and the fans blowing.  A perfect day for lounging about in one's underwear, reading and writing and not much else.  Even the nights are hot, so hot that I sleep on top of all the covers instead of underneath them (so would Dragon Lady, I assume, but she's not here right now, she's on a retreat at some zen center until tomorrow).  I love hot nights.  When it gets this hot, I need less food and less sleep.

I started the latest Harry Potter book on Thursday, couldn't put it down, loved it, finished it a few hours ago.  Then ate spinach salad, answered email (including a long contribution to the Harry Potter conversation on the Moot), drank mango juice, talked on the phone with Argus, made pasta, watched The Simpsons.  Now it's night, and I'm going to write a journal entry, which, by the time you read this, I will have already completed, since this is it.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the beginning of this journal.

The effect of adding shotokan karate to my training regimen was that I burned out and didn't want to train at all.  Blew off both karate and tae kwon do for a week, and then decided to drop karate and keep doing lots of tae kwon do, which is suiting me just fine.  See, it turns out tae kwon do is becoming kind of fun.  But karate wasn't fun.  That was the problem.  It was powerful and intense and challenging and great exercise, but there was something... ugly about it.  Something that was starting to put me off, on an aesthetic and ethical level.  I might go back to visit now and then, but it's not an art I want to train in regularly.  There's an ethic, an underlying attitude, that is directly opposite that of aikido.  A spirit of violent confrontation. 

The Founder of Aikido said, "Always practice in a spirit of joy," and I think that's one of the best and most universally-applicable pieces of instruction I've ever heard.  Tae kwon do is very different from aikido, and not built on the same principles of harmony and nonviolence, and tae kwon do students engage in sparring where they face off and try to hit and kick each other, but the spirit of joy is there.  As in aikido, the person you work with is called your partner, and when partners bow to each other before and after sparring, they smile.  There's a heirarchy, but it mostly serves to facilitate the more advanced students helping out the less advanced students.

In the karate class (and I can speak only of this particular school, not of the art as a whole), I wasn't seeing any joy.  The senior students shout like drill sergeants.  No one smiles.  What bugged me most of all, though, is that the person you work with is referred to as the opponent.  Not even your opponent - the opponent, as if the Opponent were some Platonic ideal built into the universe, rather than a figment of perspective.  I got funny looks when I said "partner" instead of "opponent."  These semantics matter, they shape our perspectives.  I want to work with partners; I'm not looking to have any opponents in my life right now. 

I've been on the other end of this semantic transaction: sometimes novice aikido students ask me about dealing with their "opponent" ("What if my opponent is a lot taller than me?"), and I reply, "there are no opponents in this art."  Most of them shrug it off - they correct themselves with an apology or a chuckle or whatever unconscious mannerism they use when the Authority Figure corrects them (you've got one too, unless you've actively done the work of discovering and mastering it), because they're well-trained by parents and school and work to try to say whatever will please the Authority Figure.  I can see them not think about it, see them do that amazing human trick of acknowledging something without internally registering it.  But some of them do a genuine double-take. Some of them give a real smile, a real pause.  These are the ones who come back next week; these are the ones who still own their minds because they can still change them.

This is not what I was planning to devote this entry to.  I was going to write about that revolution in my brain.  But I want to post this entry today, it being the journal's birthday and all, and somehow there's only 15 minutes left of today.  So... more soon.  I think a cold midnight shower is in order.  Keep cool and lounge gloriously.  And if you're in a really daring mood, might I recommend some basking?