There are scary clowns in the woods. Well not clowns, as an interview with Princesss Petunia, head of some clown organization, assured us. She said “these are not clowns, clowns are…” and I changed the radio station back to classical music because I wasn’t comfortable with hearing just what clowns were.
There are scary teenagers in clown masks and outfits in the woods. I’m not comfortable with that because it isn’t what I’m used to. I’m not used to shark models on people’s roofs, I’m glad someone got that one in Toronto taken down. There’s a bomb halfway through a roof in Shallow Lake, a little town on the way up to the cabin. Also an old motorcycle on the side of a building two stories up. Not comfortable, well the motorcycle is a leftover shop sign so maybe I’m OK with that. As long as it’s commercial signage I can understand that but strange sculptures? Who knows what sort of weird cult that might create. Not comfortable at all. Take them down and put out some pink flamingoes or some garden gnomes, I’m OK with those, I’m used to them.
New stuff is upsetting, I like to walk into the bar and have a pint of Bass put down in front of me. Don’t ask me to go to strange places or do something new in my job. I’m not comfortable with that.
In Aikido last evening I made the class do Gokyo from a cross wrist sort of thing. One of the class asked if we could do it from Yokomenuchi (about the only way you ever see that technique done) because he wasn’t comfortable doing it the new way.
Not my job to make the class comfortable. Quite the opposite in fact, a teacher should be giving his students new things to think about. With new things comes thinking about them and that’s a teacher’s job.
The whole problem of course, with teachers and learning and things like that, it leads to thinking. That’s why so many people tell us teachers aren’t doing it right. That’s why we say things like “my high school football team, right or wrong!” Thinking is uncomfortable.
I mean really, what does a bomb in the garage roof mean? Is this guy some leftie softie who is protesting the drone program dropping explosives on civilians? In Grey County? I mean this is the place where the Friday night Legion supper is in full swing at 4:30 in the afternoon. This is no citified 8pm “dinner”-eating area. Un Com For Ta Ble.
Or, with some more thinking, and looking at that bomb, I think maybe this guy had a leftover boiler and said “hey, that looks kind of a bomb, why don’t I weld on some fins and stick it on my garage”. Never thinking how uncomfortable he might be making me as I drive by. Or maybe some war refugee who might suffer PTSD as they drive by.
Unintended consequences are no excuse, everyone should think of every consequence before they do anything at all. So as not to make others uncomfortable.
Or not. Be hard to get anything done if we all did that, so maybe just people I don’t like should do that. Yeah… no, just people I notice. Yeah. Do what you want if I don’t notice it.
Anyway, back to the real topic, which is budo of course, and specifically, learning stuff that makes us uncomfortable, that is, new stuff. If you give it a try, if you think a bit, you might see that (as I was trying to demonstrate) this new thing is pretty much the same as the stuff you are comfortable with. We went through ikkyo to gokyo from the same starting point, wrists crossed at about face height in the old Bruce Lee “I’m faster than you” pose. Little shift of the feet off the partner’s attack line and our new attack line goes through his elbow to his head.
Or as we began last evening, he starts with ikkyo, driving our arm across our front, and we shift our hip onto our wrist before he gets us trapped by separating our arm from our hip with his leg, and then we take up the slack in the rope (move along our arm rather than across it with our poor old rotator cuffs) and unbalance him and reverse the move to put ikkyo on him. That’s the start, then we went into sankyo, yonkyo and gokyo. Hmm, ikkyo to sankyo by dropping our elbow hand to his hand, ikkyo to yonkyo by pulling our elbow hand down toward our wrist hand and lining up to swing the elbow like a sword, ikkyo to nikyo by flipping our wrist-hand thumb onto the other side of his wrist and onto his hand, ikkyo to gokyo by flipping the thumb the very same way but staying on the wrist… or flip it right away at the cross by dropping it and lifting again, fingers on the other side of the wrist and hey, we can do the same sort of switch right away to go into sankyo and…. it’s all the same.
Look at that, a little thought, a little open-mindedness and discussion and now something that is uncomfortable has become comfortable. Isn’t that interesting. OK yes, interesting is uncomfortable.
Maybe uncomfortable is our brain’s way of saying “this is new, be careful, pay attention” instead of the world being mean. The world is always mean, our feelings don’t come into it. Trees fall over, cliffs are high, tigers in the bushes.
Sensei is mean.
Seito Bugei Juku 