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The two most important things Aikido has taught me:
1. If you're not dead, you can still win. In judo you get thrown you've lost, in Aikido getting thrown means nothing. You get up and fight until you can't fight any longer. Seven times down eight times up. Nine times up, one thousand times up, more, if need be. And what do you do when you get up? You get back into the fight.
2. Whatever the challenge, you can train yourself to deal with it. Someone else has probably found a way of dealing with it, copy them. "I can't do this" is a daft view point. "I don't know how" is a more productive and accurate one.
My particular area of interest is women, but it applies to everything. I hate it when guys are like "she's out of my league." Defeatist talk of any kind annoys me but this especially. To misquote Iida Harima no Kami "You should at least see the colour of the enemy's flags."
Now, admittedly, he did get shot in the head just after saying it, but still, I think that reinforces the point that one's helmet belongs on ones noggin at all times whilst on the battlefield rather than discrediting the general principle that it's better to have a go, fail and learn so that you can win next time than not try and never succeed.
It's also my feeling that in all situations one should put some atemi in to see what happens. You can't say "It's impossible" until you've put in atemi and gauged the reaction.
In paintball, one of my other passions, it is said that if you don't get shot, you're not really playing the game. I think this is too is a principle of martial arts.
I know, generally we think of martial arts as the avoidance of getting shot, but it isn't. It is learning behavior that lessens the risk of getting shot. On a long enough time scale, you will get shot. Incidently it is commonly held in my dojo that getting shot in the head (with a paintball) is an excellent hang over cure. You have to be mad to train where I train.
This is where the whole "way of the warrior is found in death" thing comes from and why it is critical to everything. It's just the same as saying "At some point, no matter how good you are, you will fail" and on the battlefield failure meant you came home minus your head, which it has been said, can result in a serious and often perminent case of death.
So denying that you can fail or hiding from it isn't the way to go. The only sensible thing is to seek failure, to seek death, and get past your fear of it. So when she, to return to my previous theme, rejects you, you just brush it off, learn from your mistake and succeed elsewhere.
Life is so much like taking ukemi. You get flattened, you get up, you get flattened, you get up, you get flattened and if you're smart you learn from it and you learn to let go of your fear of it.
Life is also so much like study of technique, in fact life is largely the study of technique. Whatever you want you can have if you simply study how others got it in the same way you study how your instructor does shiho nage. Once you know how, you just keep taking ukemi until you get there.
06-14-2009 11:45 AM 