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In General
How to Eat a Fish
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#270
 02-02-2012 08:17 AM |
Some time ago, I sat down to dinner with my paternal grandparents (my "Lolo Camillo" and "Lola Oreng") while visiting them in California. They were having salted, pan-fried fish that night -- a fairly common Filipino meal with the usual steamed, white rice.
As I started to dig in, Lola Oreng shrieked in laughter just as the food was poised to enter my mouth.
"You mean you do not even know how to eat a fish?" she cried.
Bewildered, I looked down and stared in confusion at the chunk of meat on my fork.
"Susmarjosep," Lola cursed, sucking air sharply between her teeth. She snatched the fork from me and proceeded to deftly graze the tines of the fork under the filet, separating it easily from the bones.
"That," she declared proudly, "is the proper way to eat a fish,"
I've thought about her choice of words a great deal since then. While I'd rather chalk it up to her Grade 2 education and correspondingly poor command of the English language, it struck a chord.
You see, when I was a child, I was duly instructed by my father in the "proper" way to sweep the floor, the "proper" way to do the dishes, and so on and so forth. It irked me then, and it still irks me now. Perhaps if fried fish were a regular part of my diet, I thought, or if I had at that point in my life been more experienced in household chores, I would have naturally discovered the best way of performing these tasks on my own.
But the whole idea of a "proper" way is especially significant to me today - after having spent over a decade of my career working with persons with a wide variety of disabilities and watching them adapt (from what you and I able-bodied people might consider the usual way of doing something) in order to do the same thing, only differently, by using their own capabilities.
So the thing that stuck in my craw when I was eight years old and when my Lola "taught" me how to eat fish is still holds today:
"Surely," I would grumble to myself as I obediently mimicked each "proper" technique, "there isn't really a proper way of performing such tasks. What they really mean is the most efficient way,"
Some people, like my father or my grandmother, might think there's very little difference between the two. But I'm here to tell you they're worlds apart.
When I first started learning Aikido nine years ago, the perfectionist in me (now where in the world did I get that from?) was continually frustrated if I couldn't perform technique exactly the same way that everyone else could.
And the more I trained, the more my short height, light weight and small stature proved that more and more, I could not do the techniques in what I thought was the "proper" way. I would come home at the end of each class quite angry at myself, in fact.
But as time passed, I gradually understood that what we were being taught as beginners is what we call "the basic form" of the technique. Not only were we expected at some point to "train technique in order to forget it" (that is, ingrain the movements so wholly into our muscle memory that eventually they can be performed instinctively). One of the fundamental aspects of Aikido (and for a petite woman like me, one of the most martially-effective) is that it is highly adaptable: if you meet with resistance, you go with it -- you don't fight against it. If your attacker does something unexpected or starts trying to fight the technique, you don't keep doggedly trying to force it on: you do something else instead.
Eventually (and by that, I mean after quite a long time) I became less hung up on the cockeyed notion that by having to adapt technique to fit my body type, I wasn't performing it "properly". I say all this because I notice that we've had a few kindred perfectionist types join the club lately. The earlier you come to grips with this, my friends, the better.
It's only through practice and repetition that your body will find out for itself the most efficient way of moving. It's not going to happen overnight.
And at some point, in both Aikido and in life, we all have to adapt. One way or the other. It's the name of the game.
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