I've had my share of real and perceived hangups with karate, and to deny them or omit them here would be a no-no. I think my largest problem may be unique to people who join the art as a child. The others I've probably shared with lots of my classmates at one time or another. I want to (um... I'm willing to) create an environment in which I may unintentionally reveal other barriers to learning, especially my present ones.
A few things are included here merely because they fit--I don't necessarily feel pissed off every time the subject comes up, they just have some element where I'm resistant or have their drawbacks in my mind.
Growing up with Karate gets difficult if and when you try to separate your own original ideas are from those entrained by the martial arts.This is the kind of thing where I'll finish explaining it and you say ``kid, if that's the worst problem you've ever had than you're one lucky kid and shouldn't complain so much.''
I don't disagree with any of the principles I've been taught here. In general I embrace them and try to live by them. But there have been times that I've been frustrated--my own academic articles or conversations with people at work end up sounding like Karate lectures and I get worried that I've never formed a single original idea since I started training at age eleven.
By the end of college in 1992, I was quite ready to leave the dojo for a while and make sure that I could relate to the world without the constant anchor of Aoinagi UCSD and the friendly faces there. I think many people go through a similar phase in their relationship with their families. As you might expect, I found that yes, I can go to a lot of trouble to separate my Karate influence from every other experience and aspect of my personality that makes me who I am, but it sure is a pain.
I think this is resolved. I took two years away from Aoinagi UCSD, using my geographic relocation to UCLA as a good excuse. People there didn't know me as a Karate-person, I didn't train too much (and ended up missing it sorely by 1994), and by the end of Grad school I was getting tired of the academic facade and brightened up my papers by slipping in metaphors, anecdotes, stories, and principles from Karate. Same as I had been doing for years, ever since eighth-grade English.
At present, I'm not stressed about artificially separating myself from Karate or any other major influence that shapes my life. In fact, I see my career, karate training, research interests, and home-life all converging into one continuous state-of-being, with fewer divisions between where one stops and the other begins.
My parents raised me an atheist. Better yet, they bred me to distrust organized religion. Unfortunately, I sometimes view Karate as my religion and the dojo as its local church, and that ties in to all kinds of hangups that I have with religion.
The example in my mind this evening is but one of many analogies that cause me some discomfort. I'm thinking of the `Stink of Religion' versus its founding principles. This analogy comes from a story shared in our dojo some years ago.
Some Religions have detailed guidelines for exactly how a person should live and behave, based on those founding principles. Some followers of a religion may get caught up in those rules, obsessing on minor details such as wearing a suit to temple and completely forgetting the founding principles of the religion, such as respecting the worth of all other humans regardless of their wealth, social status, dress and appearance. Now we have a potential conflict between the Stink of that religion--the suggestion that followers should wear a suit to the church--and the founding principle that everyone should be nice to everyone else simply because they're human and not because they can afford to dress-up.
I recall a black-belt test in 1987, where we were asked to write down the Aoinagi Resolutions and grade our classmates' work. If a person missed a single resolution, they were dishonorably discharged from the test.
Grading on the principle of our resolutions, a wide range of responses would probably have constituted acceptable answers. What surprised and saddened me were the plethora of questions my classmates asked about how many points to take off for misplaced commas, misspelled words, inverted words, and inverted resolutions.
I think someone sincerely asked whether someone else was going to be kicked out of the training for forgetting to dot an `i.' I'd call that an example of getting caught up in the stink of a religion, and overlooking the underlying principle. Perhaps my memory is worse than what really happened, and I did tend to take things much more seriously when I was seventeen. I'm also worried I'll invert resolutions seven and eight on the exam tomorrow, so why not prep my cop-out in advance?
There are several more comparisons I could make if given some time to think and share them. In general, they relate not to the traditions of the Art itself, but they way these traditions are (mis)interpreted and (mis)applied in the western world by myself and my classmates, I believe through no intention of the Sensei at all. When I feel the social climate in the dojo resembles a church, I get uncomfortable. In recent years, I've become less uptight with the `church' vibe and haven't gone to great lengths to analyze why.
Predicted well in advance by the Sensei, I was reluctant to reduce my immense worldly and Karate experiences to a mere point-value. I also felt some initial insult from the suggestion that I might do something for its point value and not for the pure value of the activity itself.
Sensei Neville and Sensei Castilonia did a great job of introducing and marketing (my new business vocabulary, please don't be offended) the Curriculum and Mentor Judge concepts with everyone.
I've developed even more respect (awe?) for the energy that is required to define and develop a curriculum in un-charted territory. We're trying to do something similar with information literacy at work and it is an immense task.
Unfortunately, my actions haven't kept up with my acceptance of the idea--I haven't taken on the daunting task of trying to remember and quantify the experiences that have shaped my life since 1989, nor have I taken as active a role in promoting the curriculum and mentoring as I should have.
Unfortunately, relieving them of that financial burden that leaves me with quite a challenge, which can be defined as resistance. I can earn money, when I wanted to visit my homesick friend Joslyn Parenti in Italy in 1990, I took on three part-time jobs between school and had a plane ticket in time for Christmas. But I am presently unwilling to do this for every karate activity requiring a similar financial commitment.
Other time-related priorities seem to keep me away from training too, sometimes I'll even justify this as the application of one Karate principle (Pinan Shodan's direct approach to attacking and finishing one project at a time) over another (the importance of a healthy balance in life and community--not sure which Kata this can be attributed to but I'd guess the Sensei would give it a nod).
Perhaps a mixed blessing, Both Karate and Art have taught me to focus intensely on one thing at a time and do each thing right. This gets dangerous when applied to demanding projects for school and work, which always seem to ask for high-quality products delivered yesterday. Sometimes I choose to maintain a healthy balance in my life at the expense of progress at work. Other times I'll disappear for days, emerging only to use the toilet, grab some food, and return to the task-at-hand.
My present direction, pursued with the hands-on aid of my buddy with a degree in behavioral psychology, is to sleep every night (apparently I've never accomplished this, not even as a baby) and get some exercise every day. A little embarrassing since I already had this working and taken for granted during high-school, where the rigid schedule and two hours-a-day of cross-country and track ensured this balance.
My choices might have further political interpretations that I'm not intending to make. Seeing a choice between visiting Hawaii for a week of Yoga and Karate with Kathy and my Parents or attending Summer Camp, I chose Hawaii last year and was not disappointed. But am I sending an unintentional message to the Sensei that I prefer hedonistic Hawaiian vacations to the opportunity of learning from Sensei Richard Kim? Even when my decisions are fine with the Sensei, why do I always feel guilty sitting down to dinner with my family if it is on Thursday night at seven-o'clock?