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Thu, January 22, 2004
new obsession
I started going to aikido lessons and I've become completely obsessed with it. It started with the little introduction for Kuvia on Monday, and then I decided to check out one of the training sessions on Tuesday. Since I was the only new guy there, I was thrown in (literally), and when I came out an hour and a half later (somewhat bumped and bruised), I was hooked. So I went back for a slightly different session yesterday (more on that in a bit), and I can't wait to go back for more tomorrow (I'm going to get some one-on-one instruction to get up to speed).
Anyway, read on for some rather lengthy babblage on my thoughts on aikido.
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So for those of you who don't know, aikido is a Japanese martial art. The "ai" means to meet, match, unify, etc and ki is... well, ki, "do" literally means street or path, and basically means "the way of", and combined, essentially means something along the lines of "the way of uniting mind and body". When you first hear that, it might sound like a bunch of east asian hocus pocus, so let me talk about it from a slightly more modern perspective.
What is ki (prounounced like "key" but with a shorter "ee" sound). Well, people devote entire lifetimes studying ki (which, btw, is studied more generally outside of aikido), and I've probably barely scratched the surface. But I have some vague ideas, so I'll talk about that now (and maybe I can look back at this a few years down the line, and see how it's changed).
Right now, I think of ki like a dummy variable, except, instead of using it in math, you use it in your mind. It could be 0 (nothing), infinity (everything), something in between, or both at the same time. Whatever it is, I think of it like that because you can do things with it and achieve real-world results, without knowing exactly what it is. Yesterday, we trained with the bokuto (they call it "bokken", basically a wooden sword) and ki played an important role in a couple of places (well, in most aspects, not just a couple, but I'll talk about a couple).
We first started from the neutral position, where we hold the sword in our left hand (which is the equivalence of a sheathed sword). But when going from the neutral state to the ready state (where the sword is held in front), we were taught to "not change our ki". What exactly does that mean, to not change our ki? Or more importantly, why? The basic idea is that when you make that transition, you do not want your intentions known to your opponent. When our sensei does it, you can't discern the slightest change in his facial expression, or any other form of expression. If that's the ultimate goal, why not just say "don't change your facial expression"? Because you can't. Your facial expression merely reflects your state of mind, but you can't really control your state of mind directly either. So you throw in the dummy variable, ki, and concentrate on that, and somehow that does the trick.
Another more obvious application comes after that, though. So you've got the sword out in front of you, now you have to keep it centered. The obvious way to do this is to center the sword (duh). But we were taught to imagine that our ki extended through the sword and out the tip, off to infinity, and to center our ki, not the sword. The reason is obvious. If you consciously try and center your sword, when it gets knocked, you will consciously try and re-center. This conscious effort requires a trial-obersvation-correction loop (i.e. move left, over shot, go right, over shot, go back left). While you're doing this, you're concentrating on recentering the sword (as opposed to, say, the person who's about to kill you), and it just takes too long. On the other hand, you center your ki, and when the sword is knocked, it realigns itself automatically. Of course, it's not really automatic.. but it's done subconsciously, which means it's done faster, better, and you've still got your consciousness to worry about other things.
If you're still not convinced, talk to any competition marksman (or sniper), or even a professional golf player. An advanced marksman will tell you that you shouldn't try and align the gun on the target. You simply focus on the target, and if you do that right, the gun aligns itself. I had a friend in high school who was training to become a professional golf player. One of his daily excercises involved sitting a few feet away from a wall, and staring at a certain point for 5 minutes. Again, you don't try to hit the ball in one direction or another... you simply focus your attention on where the ball should go, and it goes there (assuming you have a certain level of technique, of course). I do something similar in rock climbing. When I'm stuck at a difficult place on a rock, I just tell myself that I'm going up, and the body does the rest (so I usually won't remember exactly what I did after the fact). In fact, any sport pretty much comes down to mental training when you get far enough. The only difference is, aikido starts with that, instead of ending there after years of doing something else.
Anyway, there's a whole lot more to it, but I guess the important thing for me right now is that you don't need a full understanding of what it is or how it works to use it and see the consequences. Perhaps that's one of the reasons I'm so drawn to it... unlike most other sports, the physical aspect is half (or less) of the story, and the rest is mental. The other thing I like about aikido is that, unlike most other martial arts, it's completely non-confrontational and not aggressive at all. In fact, we don't spar, and competitions (against others) are banned. We practice with others (like in one excercise yesterday, we learned how to deal with two attackers coming at you at the same time from front and back), but the purpose isn't to win (because there is no such thing), just self improvement.
Paradoxically, if you ask me, I also think it's more practical than the other martial arts. For example, in our swords training yesterday, we learned the basic moves "so that we learn not to use them". This is a striking contrast to kendo, where it's all about forms. But in reality, a real sword fight would look nothing like a kendo match. This morning, I went to the tae kwon do session for Kuvia, and at the end, two of the members saprred as a demonstration. It looked pretty messy, and I kept thinking how impractical it was. I mean, Neo can go on fighting Agent Smiths for a long time (long enough that you get tired of the special effects, at least), but really, most people would be exhausted in a matter of minutes. So, it wouldn't make sense for, say, Aragorn to try that against 10,000 Orcs and Urukai. In fact, Aragorn (in the Battle of Helms Deep scene of the movie) uses an aikido move at one point, which simply consists of crouching in front of an oncoming attacker, and scooping him up and over. This is obviously more efficient, and much less tiring than busting out jump kicks, and would be more practical in a real battlefield (at least in a medieval battlefield).
Okay, I need to go eat lunch.
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Posted Thu, January 22, 2004 18:43 by
How does this relate to the concept of muscle memory?
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