July 16, 2021
For the last seven days I have stayed inside the story of my beginnings in karate. I feel a need to pull out and come back to the present. The day is hot and still. I haven’t slept much as my cats are visiting and the white one kept me up all night, like he always does when things change in his environment. He jumped on my bedside table and started sliding things off at 2 am, then sat on my tummy and purred loudly on-and-off all night. He needs time to adjust. The black one went directly to her basket when they arrived at 1pm and slept off the trauma of being moved. She was fine after dinner.
As a friend reminded me on Facebook, I cannot end this story in just two days. In fact, as I wrote about that first month of karate, I began remembering so many more details that are important to me and it felt like I was leaving out more than I was including. It is not possible to tell the story of the next seventeen years in two posts.
When I moved to Singapore in 2008, karate was the one constant in my life. New training spaces (with blue bouncy mats, hanging bags, and mirrors), new Sensei’s (one English and one Japanese, each with very different emphasis and teaching style), new dojo mates, but still the training was the constant. It absorbed the shock of moving without a job, or friends, to keep me steady. My world of karate widened here. My yearly camps, after 2009, were at Koh Samui with Sensei George Andrews, and Okinawa became closer. If I were to tell those stories it would take days of writing.
But besides the training and the impact on body, mind, and spirit there is another aspect I want write about. The dojo is a microcosm of the world and like relationships in the world the relationships in the dojo also had much to teach me. Very often relationship challenges I was dealing with in life would appear in the dojo, and in that space they seemed even more intense and pressing to resolve. A lot had to do with hierarchy, authority, and respect. Specifically, how to cope with my normal irreverence to authority in a very hierarchical space, and how to respect seniors who I did not like much, or juniors for that matter too. Thus, how to learn from, or teach when it was juniors, while having strong negative feelings about the person. You can't always like everyone!
When I first started karate, I had a very romanticized, idealized view of it. I guess a lot of it was shaped by films and media. I believed that there was something magical about the training that automatically changed you into a better person. That if a Sensei and dojo were good then somehow all the people in the dojo would be too and especially so the senior belts. I was surprised then to find seniors and training partners I did not like because they were arrogant or insensitive. It was hard to look for that one thing in them that I could respect and negotiate those relationships. And of course, as I did this, I was always learning about myself.
Another valuable lesson I got from partner training was about boundaries. Partner drills are about helping each other learn and not about dominating the space, yet there were always partners who tried to do just that. As I learnt to understand and defend my space in attack-defence training drills, I learnt how to control my boundaries with others in life. Now as I spend more time with karate, meet more people on this journey, I do find many more who have integrated the values of traditional karate than those who have been untouched by them.
When I started the last third of this experiment with that memory of being restricted from martial arts in childhood and consequently making choices based on rebellion, I could have traversed the writing path I have i.e., about karate, or I could have written about how I found my way back to making choices based on my core needs. There is yet much to reflect on, discover and express on this path, but I wonder if I could go back to the other too.
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