Hidden In Plain Sight
It took me multiple times to get my essay to this point. I started with an idea and then I would lose it. My thoughts seemed wither away and dry up. It felt like getting stuck in a rut so I’d put it off which just got me more stuck. The big ideas I wanted to connect to what I’ve learned from my teachers and the curriculum are interrelated to everything I have learned during my time on this planet. And I had a variety of ideas on how to do this: the mind the body and the soul, elements and building blocks from the natural world and the cycles and rhythms of life. But every time I started, I ended up at a dead end, stuck because there was so much I wanted to say that I couldn’t say anything. And I didn’t know how to pull together the threads I had started. You might say that I kept getting lost in my own thoughts because of the web of interconnectedness of everything in space and time.
Then, I was traveling somewhere and my mind wandered as it does when it goes on autopilot. As it traveled along the strands in the web of everything, something connected and I remembered one of the first things I was told when I having issues solving a problem in the dojo, “feel gravity, find kamai.” This is how I came to answer the question of what To-Shin Do means to me.
Lessons In Common Sense
Reflecting back on what I have learned since I was a white belt, there are some patterns and levels that stand out. First, learn the basics. Next, level up your skills by investigating the details. Finally find answers to the question, “what are some practical applications for these skills?”
To Shin Do reinforces something that I keep seeing in life related to mastery. True masters are not masters because they can do super fancy or complex things. They can do super fancy and complex things because they have a supreme understanding of the basics. Even more than merely understanding, a master can create and combine novel applications only using the basics. As I have progressed and the teachers in the NPMAC dojo have taught me the basics for kata’s, skills and To-Shin Do in general, I’ve come to appreciate the basics for what they are - a foundation for self guided learning.
Leveling up with details happens with familiarity and rudimentary grasp of the basics. Once you know ‘the thing’ as some folks say, there are an infinite level of details to fix, improve and refine as you investigate the application of those basic skills. Then, with the experience of focusing on the details and being corrected and advised by my teachers, the practical applications just make sense. When I think about what we are doing, it seems like common sense and that everyone should know it.
IRL
The next question that To-Shin Do begins to answer for me is, “what does this mean for me in the real life?” This is a hard question to answer for me because I tend to unconsciously carry a lot of my past with me that only crops up in weird ways as I try make sense of new knowledge. A lot of my past is rooted in where I grew up (a small town in Ohio with access to old growth forests to play in), the study of biology and ecosystems and riding things (snowboarding and skateboarding at first and later mountain bikes and horses). Somehow, I’ve managed to find ways to apply the knowledge I’ve picked up in these areas to just about anything new that I encounter. There are a lot of areas and I think thats what was so paralyzing when I first started trying to write this. Then, one night when we were playing with cover and focus in the ninja secrets class, I made a connection with something and realized that I was so concerned with everything that I was missing out on anything. I was lacking focus. All I really needed to do was choose three things about To-Shin Do in real life that mean something to me, any three would do. And the first three I chose would likely be more important than most of the others. Then I could focus on writing about why they were important.
Gravity and balance is the first and easiest to cross correlate. I started snowboarding when I was fourteen or fifteen and got to the point where I was comfortable riding the medium sized jumps and occasionally even bigger ones at the resort parks and then I ventured out into the back country for the virgin lines and fresh powder. You can’t do either of those things with out feeling gravity and having balance. Much of how we move in To-Shin Do as we apply our skills, work on kata and practice randori is rooted in the control of or body’s response to gravity and the balance (kamei) we find along the way and I draw heavily on my experience finding lines while sliding down the mountain when I try to find lines and feel my way through a problem in the dojo.
Then there is work and people. This is an interesting correlation to the real world. It has a lot to do with the elements and how they are described for our curriculum. Earth, water, fire, wind and the voids between them describe more than just the phases of SKH curriculum! They describe me and my moods. They describe the people around me. They give me clues to how I can use the qualities of each as tools to dealing with the ‘people problems.’ Not all ‘problems’ are negative, sure some people are not pleasant to deal with and the elements offer clues for dealing with those folks. But, humans are lovable but messy and disorganized or organized but distant and distracted. And here the many different elemental qualities opened my eyes as more than just tools for training in the dojo.
Finally, just keep walking. Anything worth doing is not going to be easy and it will be a journey to get to the destination point where you can say, “I did it!” I think about the first time I put skins on a split-board and started skinning up a mountain so I could summit and ride a virgin line through fresh powder. It was quite a journey and it started long before I parked my car and put on the skins to start climbing. It was a series of steps, each one taking me closer to the goal of coming home safely after experiencing a mountain summit on a clear crisp day with an untouched field of fresh powder in front of me. For me, earning my black belt is like that. It started with a nebulous idea long before I made the call to the Newbury Park Martial Arts Center and put on a white belt. It was a series of steps, one at a time that slowly brought me closer to the goal of having skills that help me deal with problems in the world. And most importantly to me, it will help my daughter deal with problems in the world when she is confronted with them.
Punctuated Equilibrium
Finally, this ins’t so much an answer to a question but the connection of patterns and cycles to problems and patterns in different domains. Punctuated equilibrium describes biological evolutionary development that is marked by isolated episodes of rapid change between long periods of little or no change. Oddly enough, learning and mastering human skills and knowledge has a lot in common with this description of how a species evolves in the natural world.
I’ve seen this in my training. The curriculum in the dojo is set up for regular cycles and it establishes a foundation that helped me have a consistent routine. When I look back and evaluate myself, I see my skill progression as a series of long plateau’s with a few key insights and breakthrough’s facilitated by teachers who helped me evolve into the next level.
On a long enough timeline and if you ignore the colored belts, earning a blackbelt is just that: cycles of stagnation and training with periods of rapid and significant breakthroughs. These cycles repeat over and over with variations in what is learned and how the learner choses to be educated. The difference between natural evolution and a conscious decision to evolve ones knowledge and skill sets is that in nature everything is left to random chance and it takes a really, really, really long time. But as a human I have conscious decision making abilities, fostered by the cycle of the dojo that I can use to seek out and integrate feedback. To a certain extent, I can control and increase the speed of those cycles.
Reaching black belt is just the end of one of the larger cycles with in the meta cycle called progression (or evolution). And the end of a cycle is a chance to reflect on what that means and seek out feedback as I prepare for the next cycle, whatever it may hold. No matter what it holds, it is a chance to begin again. We always begin again. For me this means to continue to train as a black belt. Which means a beginner’s mind, an empty mind (yes, thats from the book). Which means another chance for refinement of the basics and more attention to the details. It means more long plateaus of plodding along, one step at a time while looking for insight and guidance that will unlock the next level of understanding. It means knowing that when I get to the next level of understanding the cycle will continue and repeat with variations. This is natural and this is a path to mastering the basics.
To me, it seems that To-Shin Do is a journey to mastery. It is a mountain that you cannot summit but is worth attempting to climb in every season and in any weather condition with the plan that brings you safely home, summit or not. It is committing to walking forward, one step at a time with as many partners as possible for as long as possible.
