More questions and one answer

June 25, 2020

Just made a pot using the last of the ‘lucky lychee’ green tea. The subtle lychee flavours on a hot afternoon like today feel energizing. I am not thinking of rushing to get more, like I would have before, but instead want to use up all the teas I have before acquiring more. There is a need to pare down things that I only noticed this week as we are opening up again.

The libraries will open on July 1^st, not yet for sitting, but borrowing and returning books. I had been waiting for this. I hadn’t been reading much during the lockdown and have fallen two books behind in my Goodreads challenge of fifty books a year. I told myself it was because e-books didn’t hold my attention, but I did have unread print books on my shelves and I didn’t read them either. Surprisingly, now I want to read them. Earlier I would go the library, wander through the stacks and walk away with far more books than I could read in the allowed six weeks, and ignore the ones on my shelf that I  told myself I could read anytime. But I want to read them before borrowing more. Hmm…

Ok, I am rambling, and I don’t do that in these posts. Here I have a vague set of related thoughts I focus my mind on, while in my journal I follow wherever the mind goes. 

I wrote a story during the time I wasn’t writing the blog, I started collecting the things I need to send to the accountant for my taxes in India, I did lessons in my online drawing course, and I trained for the first time in an online gasshuku with Sensei Bakkies in South Africa. It felt very strange to put on a gi and train long hours alone in the living room. But I emerged glowing, something that happens each time I can transit from the role of teacher to student.

Learning karate is where I want to be permanently. So, when I had these months, since March 23^rd, of solitary training I was heavenly happy. It felt right to have the time to re-establish my relationship to karate – doing whatever I needed and wanted to do just for myself. It took me back to the state of mind I had about karate when I first joined it in 2004. Something very personal, spiritual and something that kept me anchored into the present moment like nothing else was doing at that point. 

In our dojo we do a lot of partner work. A student who had trained in other dojo’s that taught traditional karate had remarked that to me, and I had replied -- because we can, and should be, doing a lot of basics and kata on our own, I like to use our time together to learn other skills that supplement that. Nothing keeps you present like partner work where the consequence of your mind wandering could be a whack to the head. 

Somewhere in these three months of self-training I found I pared down my training to the very basics again. For the first month I didn’t even do any kata except Sanchin. It felt good and right. I do enjoy learning more than teaching. Teaching brings in angst and complicates my relationship to karate which is otherwise pure pleasure. Which brings up many questions – Why is it this way? Why do I continue teaching? How can I keep the angst out of the equation while teaching?

For now, I am going to follow Rilke’s advise about these questions

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

One question – why am I writing this blog and will it help – did find some answers. The one story I wrote after months of a dry spell came from thoughts and explorations begun in this blog. It was a story of tension between hope and hopelessness and how in the latter state you can lose all touch with the former, and visa versa perhaps. So, I plan to continue writing, but it might be less frequent as my tasks are increasing as the lockdown eases.