Let’s call it 2001, maybe 2002. I’m testing for one of the lower color belt ranks at the School of Love. I am among the most junior of the testing group in the Shuri Ryu system, but I’ve been training in the martial arts longer than any one of the rank-promotion candidates.
Among the testing group is a senior student, a gifted phenom going for her brown belt. None of us has really realized how much we are counting on her to set our course, to lead the group through the rigors of the test, until we’re told during warm-ups that she has the ‘flu and won’t be coming.
We flounder. We hit the floor in perfect disarray. Our Sensei’s disapproval is palpable when she tells us, in the first twenty minutes of basics, to pull it together.
I am in agony. I feel a responsibility to step up and take the lead. In a different setting, any one of the other students—even the missing student—could be my junior. Duty, rank, responsibility weigh on me. The group is looking for a center that can hold. Shouldn’t I be that center?
In equal measure I feel the weight of the test I showed up to take: the junior rank, the techniques I have practiced and memorized, the struggle to maintain beginner’s mind in this new style. I want to commit to my student self, I don’t want to step across the line to be the leader of the pack.
Then it comes to me, a perfectly formed sentence typed across my mind. “If I am different, the group will be different.” I don’t have to take on more than my share. But if I change my way of being—not taking the lead, but being both fully present and completely different—it’s likely that something else will shift. And then something else, and so on, and so on. Change moving through the group like the ripples off the proverbial butterfly’s wing.
This is why we take these tests: not so our teachers can see us throwing the punches and kicks and blocks they’ve already seen in a hundred classes. It’s so we can have these flashes of insight where training mirrors life, our foibles set up to strike us down, and we rise above them.
Sometimes when I think I have to fix everything, when I think I’m the one who has to step up and save the day, I remember that all I have to do to make a situation different is to be different myself. If I change, the world around me changes. I don’t have to change it all. I just have to change me. Most of the time, that’s challenge enough.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
mind body mama: abundant Tupperware; self-defense doings
Last week, Small and I cleaned out the plastic container cabinet.
I know, this is not why you tune in here. If you are following this blog to support your domestic endeavors, your household is in serious trouble.
But stick with me a moment while I tell you my container cabinet epiphany. We got up early on Saturday morning and emptied thedisgusting, dilapidated antique cabinet that holds the plastic containers, jars and lids. I relocated the springform and angel food cake pans to another location while Small matched every container with a lid. Then I threw away all the mis-matches, and just for fun I also threw away all the containers I don’t like. I got really crazy and also tossed the containers that are frequently confused with one another, even though they add so much to busy mornings, what with the excitement and intrigue of lids that are close-but-no-cigar.
We have approximately half the number of objects we started with in the cabinet now. But every time I open it I get a little thrill of abundance: “Look how many great containers we have!” Because every single thing in the cabinet is useful. Every container we kept is one that I actually like to use. When I open the door I am peering into a space uncluttered by things that don’t work.
Over and over I have to learn this lesson: in the dojo, in relationships, and apparently, in the kitchen cabinets. Let go of the dysfunctional, the worn-out, the broken and mis-matched and the things you just don’t prefer. Let go. The result is never, ever, less than you started with. It is always more. More space, more speed, more efficiency, more power, more ease, more coordination, more time, more happy.
Self Defense Doings
P.S.: If you're within the sound of my voice, you may be interested in my upcoming self-defense programs for parents, teens and queerfolk. Click here for a beautiful flyer by the ever gracious and talented Anne Campbell.
I know, this is not why you tune in here. If you are following this blog to support your domestic endeavors, your household is in serious trouble.
But stick with me a moment while I tell you my container cabinet epiphany. We got up early on Saturday morning and emptied the
We have approximately half the number of objects we started with in the cabinet now. But every time I open it I get a little thrill of abundance: “Look how many great containers we have!” Because every single thing in the cabinet is useful. Every container we kept is one that I actually like to use. When I open the door I am peering into a space uncluttered by things that don’t work.
Over and over I have to learn this lesson: in the dojo, in relationships, and apparently, in the kitchen cabinets. Let go of the dysfunctional, the worn-out, the broken and mis-matched and the things you just don’t prefer. Let go. The result is never, ever, less than you started with. It is always more. More space, more speed, more efficiency, more power, more ease, more coordination, more time, more happy.
Self Defense Doings
P.S.: If you're within the sound of my voice, you may be interested in my upcoming self-defense programs for parents, teens and queerfolk. Click here for a beautiful flyer by the ever gracious and talented Anne Campbell.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
mind body mama: Building Bombs
My first lover was 17 in 1968. She went to Woodstock, squeezing her lean frame and her knapsack into the back seat of the convertible when her sister’s friends pulled up outside her mother’s house. Or she didn’t go, watching their tail-lights pull away and her sister’s hair sailing like a signal flag behind, knowing immediately that she’d made the choice she’d regret forever.
I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter to me anymore, if it ever did.
When I met this woman seventeen years later (do the math and be disturbed by the equation: it should disturb) she held the influences of that era, the language and philosophy of radical change. Now, no longer in her thrall, her stories tell me a different story than the one she used to woo a naïve teenager.
I’ll bet she was peripheral to the dope-smoking, squat-living, music-making, politically charged circles her braver, wilder sister ran in. And I’ll bet that they themselves were peripheral to the true radicals of the time, admiring rather than adhering to the precepts of the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground. They were middle-class suburban teenagers for Pete’s sakes, and though the cauldron of the sixties forged a good number of good kids into terrorists, I’m guessing that time was not so different than any other time, with only a very few committed body and soul to the mechanics of any undertaking and the others like-minded hangers on.
In her time, seventeen years before the 9/11 when I would be born, terror could still be considered by a well-intentioned, privileged teenaged girl an admirable means to a political end. Thirty-three years before the 9/11 that would change everything we ever thought we knew about terror.
In that time, her time, an older activist told my first lover and the other wanna-be dilettantes,
“We’ll know that you are building bombs when you stop talking about building bombs.”
This phrase has a place in the library of my heart. It is potent in a way that transcends its wording, and its wording—like the Bible verses that still comfort my atheist soul—is so divergent from my current belief system that its resonance seems anathema. But my private Babel fish translates this aphorism into the most personal of touchstones, a shred of philosophy to which I aspire, even as I revile the motives and actions it represents.
Maybe because I heard it when I was a teenager when my thinking was still elastic, picking up imprints like Silly Putty on the funnies. Maybe because, even before the 9/11 that is now the only 9/11, the gulf in impact between talking about bombs and building bombs was so bald, the impotence of talk laid so bare in the radical soldier derisively chiding the sycophant —“We’ll know that you are building bombs when you stop talking about building bombs.”
There are, of course, other ways to express a similar sentiment. “Less talking, more doing” I’ll tell my students or children in my care. "A little less conversation a little more action,” sings the King and Ben Lee, “Whatever it is—just do it.” In my family of origin the saying is “Shit or get off the pot.” Perhaps it is a variation of the martial arts principle “Master speech and silence.”
Because there is a way that talking about a problem—and let’s not limit ourselves to talking, but also consider ranting, yelling, crying, writing, ruminating, obsessing, emoting and strategizing—that masks the fact that you’re not actually doing anything about it. The talky-talk can distract you for years from your love affair with the problem itself, from the fact of its intransigence and your own complicit inaction. "Blah-blah-blah," you blather on and the sound of your own voice hypnotizes you out of noticing that nothing is blowing up.
But doing something about a problem is just about completely silent. It’s precision wiring under a bare light bulb in the basement workroom of your heart. Talking about a problem, like talking about building bombs, is approval-seeking. The serpent of ego whispers under the commisserating coffee date, “Agree with me, admire the solutions in my mind, congratulate me on being on the side of right and good, let’s wonder together: why oh why can’t everyone be more like me?” But doing what you’ve already determined in your own heart and mind needs to be done dispenses with approval, commiseration, ego. There’s no sense in talking about it anymore.
Like building a bomb, charting a new course through an old problem will have impact, repercussions, perhaps even collateral damage. There is risk involved, so much more risk than just running your mouth about something that doesn’t sit right with you. But unlike talk that dissipates like sound and smoke, action is manifest. It will impact, affect, change you. Maybe change your world.
And here is where the metaphor breaks down, where the words of my mantra parse to their destructive literalism. Because shedding the talky-talk, the endless willingness to bullshit and discuss and analyze and ponder a problem, is not destructive, it’s constructive. Even if the collateral damage is a loss of community with those who’d rather smoke dope than read schematics. Even if the action you take is a solo mission. Even if there is silence over the coffee cups where you used to slide into a familiar and long-standing rant.
When you take action, when you break the cycle of circuitous babble and self-satisfied contemplation, it’s like shedding an ocean. You just walk right out of the surf with the water streaming off your body and the undertow sucking at your feet and the warm bath of stultifying inactivity inviting you back to its embrace. You put your back to it and lift one strong leg at a time and walk up the beach into a new way of being. You are alone but you are no longer asleep.
Stop the talky-talk. A little less conversation, a little more action. Master speech and silence. Shit or get off the pot. Whatever it is—just do it. We’ll know you’re building bombs when you stop talking about building bombs.
I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter to me anymore, if it ever did.
When I met this woman seventeen years later (do the math and be disturbed by the equation: it should disturb) she held the influences of that era, the language and philosophy of radical change. Now, no longer in her thrall, her stories tell me a different story than the one she used to woo a naïve teenager.
I’ll bet she was peripheral to the dope-smoking, squat-living, music-making, politically charged circles her braver, wilder sister ran in. And I’ll bet that they themselves were peripheral to the true radicals of the time, admiring rather than adhering to the precepts of the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground. They were middle-class suburban teenagers for Pete’s sakes, and though the cauldron of the sixties forged a good number of good kids into terrorists, I’m guessing that time was not so different than any other time, with only a very few committed body and soul to the mechanics of any undertaking and the others like-minded hangers on.
In her time, seventeen years before the 9/11 when I would be born, terror could still be considered by a well-intentioned, privileged teenaged girl an admirable means to a political end. Thirty-three years before the 9/11 that would change everything we ever thought we knew about terror.
In that time, her time, an older activist told my first lover and the other wanna-be dilettantes,
“We’ll know that you are building bombs when you stop talking about building bombs.”
This phrase has a place in the library of my heart. It is potent in a way that transcends its wording, and its wording—like the Bible verses that still comfort my atheist soul—is so divergent from my current belief system that its resonance seems anathema. But my private Babel fish translates this aphorism into the most personal of touchstones, a shred of philosophy to which I aspire, even as I revile the motives and actions it represents.
Maybe because I heard it when I was a teenager when my thinking was still elastic, picking up imprints like Silly Putty on the funnies. Maybe because, even before the 9/11 that is now the only 9/11, the gulf in impact between talking about bombs and building bombs was so bald, the impotence of talk laid so bare in the radical soldier derisively chiding the sycophant —“We’ll know that you are building bombs when you stop talking about building bombs.”
There are, of course, other ways to express a similar sentiment. “Less talking, more doing” I’ll tell my students or children in my care. "A little less conversation a little more action,” sings the King and Ben Lee, “Whatever it is—just do it.” In my family of origin the saying is “Shit or get off the pot.” Perhaps it is a variation of the martial arts principle “Master speech and silence.”
Because there is a way that talking about a problem—and let’s not limit ourselves to talking, but also consider ranting, yelling, crying, writing, ruminating, obsessing, emoting and strategizing—that masks the fact that you’re not actually doing anything about it. The talky-talk can distract you for years from your love affair with the problem itself, from the fact of its intransigence and your own complicit inaction. "Blah-blah-blah," you blather on and the sound of your own voice hypnotizes you out of noticing that nothing is blowing up.
But doing something about a problem is just about completely silent. It’s precision wiring under a bare light bulb in the basement workroom of your heart. Talking about a problem, like talking about building bombs, is approval-seeking. The serpent of ego whispers under the commisserating coffee date, “Agree with me, admire the solutions in my mind, congratulate me on being on the side of right and good, let’s wonder together: why oh why can’t everyone be more like me?” But doing what you’ve already determined in your own heart and mind needs to be done dispenses with approval, commiseration, ego. There’s no sense in talking about it anymore.
Like building a bomb, charting a new course through an old problem will have impact, repercussions, perhaps even collateral damage. There is risk involved, so much more risk than just running your mouth about something that doesn’t sit right with you. But unlike talk that dissipates like sound and smoke, action is manifest. It will impact, affect, change you. Maybe change your world.
And here is where the metaphor breaks down, where the words of my mantra parse to their destructive literalism. Because shedding the talky-talk, the endless willingness to bullshit and discuss and analyze and ponder a problem, is not destructive, it’s constructive. Even if the collateral damage is a loss of community with those who’d rather smoke dope than read schematics. Even if the action you take is a solo mission. Even if there is silence over the coffee cups where you used to slide into a familiar and long-standing rant.
When you take action, when you break the cycle of circuitous babble and self-satisfied contemplation, it’s like shedding an ocean. You just walk right out of the surf with the water streaming off your body and the undertow sucking at your feet and the warm bath of stultifying inactivity inviting you back to its embrace. You put your back to it and lift one strong leg at a time and walk up the beach into a new way of being. You are alone but you are no longer asleep.
Stop the talky-talk. A little less conversation, a little more action. Master speech and silence. Shit or get off the pot. Whatever it is—just do it. We’ll know you’re building bombs when you stop talking about building bombs.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Linky link Labor Day
If you're interested in what runs around in my head when I'm doing my fitness thing, check out my reflections on military-style fitness regimes over at my business blog: Civilians do well to learn from military fitness protocols.
Friday, September 3, 2010
From the BirthPie and Sweetie Files
Early this week Birth Pie called.
“OK, so you have that hour free on Friday because Mimi (1) rescheduled you, right? Can we have coffee then?”
“I’m already holding that time to have coffee with you (2), I just hadn’t told you yet.”
“Good. See you then.”
Such is the mind-meld between me and my other wife: she knows my schedule by heart and we are able to arrange appointments without the annoyance of speaking to one another.
I submit the following recent examples of the mind-meld between me and my actual wife of fifteen years:
1. Movie Night
Me: “Sweetie, did you pick up a movie in town?”(3)
Sweetie: “I knew there was something telling me to stay in town for some reason, but I couldn’t figure out what it was so I came home.”
2. Clam Juice (4)
Me: “Wasn’t there clam juice in here?”
Sweetie: “What?”
Me: “Clam juice. I used half the bottle in that shrimp dish and froze the other half in an ice cube tray for the next time I make that recipe.” (5)
Sweetie: “Oh.”
Me: “What?”
Sweetie: “I thought it was chicken broth. I put it in the chili.”
3. Love,Need Hate and Want You
The scene: a very groovy restaurant in Portland, ME. (6)
The set-up: after a long day in the sun I am feeling very nauseated, tired and head-achy. Unable to face my bacon, avocado and cheese salad, I start getting a little misty. This distracts Small from her blue-cheese burger with a side salad (7) and gets her a little anxious.
Sweetie: “Mama, Small is getting a little upset. Could you pull it together?”
Me: (Silently mouthing across the table while Small is distracted by local organic mesclun greens) “I need you.”
Sweetie: “I hate you too, honey.”
Endnotes:
1.) The masochist’s massage therapist.
2.) We ended up going for a walk three hours later, but that’s a different story.
3.) Implied: “I have been sending you telepathic messages to pick up a movie.”
4.) Really.
5.) Again, really.
6.) Silly's.
7.) As we confirmed to the startled waitress, yes, really.
“OK, so you have that hour free on Friday because Mimi (1) rescheduled you, right? Can we have coffee then?”
“I’m already holding that time to have coffee with you (2), I just hadn’t told you yet.”
“Good. See you then.”
Such is the mind-meld between me and my other wife: she knows my schedule by heart and we are able to arrange appointments without the annoyance of speaking to one another.
I submit the following recent examples of the mind-meld between me and my actual wife of fifteen years:
1. Movie Night
Me: “Sweetie, did you pick up a movie in town?”(3)
Sweetie: “I knew there was something telling me to stay in town for some reason, but I couldn’t figure out what it was so I came home.”
2. Clam Juice (4)
Me: “Wasn’t there clam juice in here?”
Sweetie: “What?”
Me: “Clam juice. I used half the bottle in that shrimp dish and froze the other half in an ice cube tray for the next time I make that recipe.” (5)
Sweetie: “Oh.”
Me: “What?”
Sweetie: “I thought it was chicken broth. I put it in the chili.”
3. Love,
The scene: a very groovy restaurant in Portland, ME. (6)
The set-up: after a long day in the sun I am feeling very nauseated, tired and head-achy. Unable to face my bacon, avocado and cheese salad, I start getting a little misty. This distracts Small from her blue-cheese burger with a side salad (7) and gets her a little anxious.
Sweetie: “Mama, Small is getting a little upset. Could you pull it together?”
Me: (Silently mouthing across the table while Small is distracted by local organic mesclun greens) “I need you.”
Sweetie: “I hate you too, honey.”
Endnotes:
1.) The masochist’s massage therapist.
2.) We ended up going for a walk three hours later, but that’s a different story.
3.) Implied: “I have been sending you telepathic messages to pick up a movie.”
4.) Really.
5.) Again, really.
6.) Silly's.
7.) As we confirmed to the startled waitress, yes, really.
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