Through New Eyes

by River Stone

Six years ago, I became a father. My wife went into labour while I was on the mats, and my role as a father and my study of the martial arts have been entwined ever since. It was not long after my son was born that I became a black belt– he has never known a time when I was not "a dojo guy".

Watching him grow and learn opened my perspectives around my own learning, and the learning processes of those I train with.

Small children learn language from the general to the specific – one of my son's first words was "cow", which referred to a cardboard cutout of a cartoon cow. We reinforced the idea with a cow-shaped teething toy. "Cowcowcow..." he grinned proudly as he waved it. Suddenly, everything was "cow": the fridge, a toy police car, bits of paper... it took me a bit to realize that "cow" had become the word for "anything that is black & white".

I've since discovered that this kind of misconception is not the exclusive domain of teething infants. I'd done almost exactly the same kind of thing in my technical practice for years: I would latch on to a word or a method of doing something without really understanding the underlying idea that my teacher was driving at.

The very first technique I learned in my study of Aikido was robusé. My teacher drilled the basic form endlessly. I learned the method in minute detail: where to place my hand and fingers, how to turn my feet, how far to step. One day, my teacher came in and showed something quite different, proclaiming it, too, to be robusé. I fastidiously learned this "second version", adding it to my mental toolbox of techniques.

Where there are two, there are inevitably three, then four, then more... and I gleefully gathered a collection of variations, like a kind of martial recipe-book. Like any hoarder, this collection became too big to manage; I found myself starting to forget variations! I tried writing them down, but to no avail.

It was only years later that I came to understand: none of the methods I'd memorized really represented robusé. Each of them was an example, but not a complete description. Robusé is a kind of motion that the techniques induce in an attacker's body, and the ways to induce that motion are myriad.

Once I stopped looking at the techniques as a step-by-step recipe for an outcome, new kinds of patterns emerged. Sometimes it was a particular shift in body weight, sometimes a way of inducing an action andreaction, sometimes finding a very fine line between using too much force and not enough... but these were all coming from a study of the same techniques.

It's much like seeing a film as an adult that I'd only ever seen as a child; there are layers of meaning that I didn't have the necessary context to "get" when I first started learning.

There are no doubt many more layers of understanding beneath what I've learned thus far.

At the dojo, we often talk about cultivating a "beginner's mind" as a way to see with new eyes, but I've also noticed that my own eyes are continuously renewed through experience. What I see looking at an image today is not what I would have seen a year ago.

In the last year, my son has started coming to training with me. Saturday mornings are a time for sharing breakfast, and ideas, and questions, and jokes. "Dojo day" has become something we both look forward to doing together.

Nonetheless, there is still a gap between our levels of training that feels enormous. I see him making mistakes that I myself made as a beginner, and while I want to hand him the solutions to close the perceived gap, I know I can't; I would be robbing him of the chance to understand the art on his own.

Understanding is the goal, but it can't be forced. Sometimes it comes quickly, sometimes it comes slowly, and sometimes you just have to hold the door open and give understanding the time it needs.