The world has not gotten any saner in the last year. If anything, it has gotten more insane. That makes what you do here even more important, from many different perspectives.
Obviously, self defense can be a very useful aspect of what we do. No matter how good you get at self defense there are times when nothing can save you. That is part of our training too. Losing. Losing is not a bad thing, it just is. More important than losing is how you do it. What do you learn from it. All of us make mistakes. The whole point of losing is to learn to do things differently. Doing things the same way leads to the same results. If a way of doing things leads to a result you don't like, don't repeat that way of doing things. But even doing things perfectly can get you killed.
Which leads to my second point. In the end all of us will die. Death is not an issue. When and how is an issue. Most of us want to prolong it as long as possible and make it as pain free as possible. Preferably a death we don't see coming and one that we don't notice till we are through it. It doesn't always work out that way. As a matter of fact, it very seldom works out that way. Most of us will die with a great deal of pain and the knowledge that death is near. Historically, most of us have died with fear too. Fear of that impending death.
Dying is very important, but not something we can avoid. Sometimes perfect action still leads to death. Under those conditions it seems to me the important thing is the manner of our death. Did we die with fear? If we did die with fear, did we do the ight thing in spite of our fear? Did we face our fear and go through it? Did we die doing our absolute best to be and do whatever it was that we found necessary at that time? Did we die with honesty to ourselves?
Then again, when people die from violence they very seldom accept that they are dying. It just happens. They spend the last moments of their lives in great fear trying to avoid the dying. Trying to avoid pain. Most of them would do anything to avoid what is happening, including selling their conscience and morals. Try not to judge those folks as failures, it's our nature to try to stay alive. They are living and dying from their own particular space and perspective and it is not our place to judge them as failures. Only they and the creator know for sure.
Other than training in the physical means of self defense what are we doing here that would serve you well in those conditions? That is my third point.
We are trying to train ourselves to respond in an appropriate fashion to attacks. We use physical attacks by other persons for our training. In the Aikido classes, we try to respond to attacks without injuring the attacker. In the aikijutsu, injury is not avoided. In the weapons classes, injury is a given were the conditions real. All of them are dealing with attacks. And all of them are only dealing with you and your perceptions.
Sounds strange I know, but there ya go. All we are really doing is training to deal with situations that cause you stress and/or fear. We are using attacks and simulated violence to accomplish that goal. To deal with multiple roundhouse punches coming fast and hard induces stress and fear in most of us. And the same thing with a knife attack. And with jiyu waza, where we have no idea what will be coming.
None of what we do is attacking other people or imposing our beliefs on them. That is the way to the insanity that the world seems to be indulging in. None of that is conducive to having a world without that insanity. One of the phrases we use in the Aikido classes is that we are trying to deal with violence without adding to the violence. In our training here we don't want to add to the insanity.
So what are we doing that carries over into the world at large? Am I saying our training is to change the world? No, I have no messiah complex. What we are doing is trying to send each of the people who train here out into the world at large with tools to deal with the insanity. Both the insanity in the world around them and the insanity within them. Because we all have some in us you know. And the world that is so insane has sanity in it too.
Should you find yourself in a position during the coming year to be faced with that insanity on a personal level it is my hope that you have trained enough to be able to deal with it without becoming insane yourself. And if you face that insanity and it leads to your death or the death of your loved ones it is my deepest hope that you deal with it calmly and with adherence to your internal convictions. It is my hope that all of us have the courage to face our own fears and live free of them.
We can only be free of the insanity if we follow our moral convictions no matter what happens and allow others to do the same. And remember: life is not a dress rehearsal.
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