JP3

I know you guys were talking in a "different direction," so to speak, but I am very impressed with the imagery of the following gstatement, taken by itself.

"You seem to see the hierarchy as a yoke that you are forced to labor under, my experience has been people offering a hand up."

I jus tlike that. Apologies for dragging the thread sideways on a philisophical tangent.

On a more numerical bent, let's take a good, close, analytical look at the whole 10,000 hours thing and put it in perspective. I've heard very good doctorate-level physical education teachers say that it takes 10,000 repetitions of a movement to make that muscle movement the most automatic, most relaxed, most efficient that it can be, as it is the 10,000 repititions that moves the physical movement from the conscious control to the unconscious.

OK, so average class is 2 hours (nice place to play). You, because you are hard-core, go 5 times a week (to make the math easier, and because you are hard-core). That = 10 hours a week.

10,000 hours / 10 hours/week = 1,000 weeks

Ouch. 1,000 weeks?! So, there's 52 weeks/year, so that's 19.23 years, at 5 days a week!

OK, so let's say we are a "real world" dedicated aikido practitioner, who goes to the dojo for practice an average of 2.5 times/week, including the occasional seminar when there's a big bump in hours,... then the period is nigh-on 40 years.

Do-able? Yes. Perhaps a philisophical "in the next lifetime" by medieval Japan standards, also perhaps?

Let's just say, nobody we know "masters" this stuff, but we do know people personally who get really, really dang good at it, eh?