View Single Post
Old 10-31-2010, 11:00 AM   #141
George S. Ledyard
 
George S. Ledyard's Avatar
Dojo: Aikido Eastside
Location: Bellevue, WA
Join Date: Jun 2000
Posts: 2,670
Offline
Re: Is two Days a week enough?

Quote:
Carsten Möllering wrote: View Post
Most people go to work everyday. For (nearly) a lifetime if this is possible.
Most people see their familiy members everyday. For a lifetime if it is possible.
Why should aikido be different if someone is committed to practice?
Hi Carsten,
This touches on something really important... I would say that O-Sensei never thought of or intended Aikido to be a "hobby". It is a Budo a Michi.

Personally, I think that Aikido has tremendous depth and sophistication and the practice has the potential to be trans-formative in a host of ways. As I said before, it represents "old knowledge" which one might consider worth a lot of effort to preserve in this modern world.

As Americans, we have allowed our selves to be subsumed by work. We derive a huge part of our sense of self from our jobs. We think very little of not seeing the family as much as we'd like, if the cause is work related. We get less vacation than any other industrialized nation in the world and the average American doesn't use up what we have.

We are a nation of workaholics. We are by far the richest nation in the world but feel we have to scramble just to keep our heads above water. We don't have time for the things that would enrich our souls because we have bought into this whole idea that we are what our jobs are. And this is getting worse... All those things you hear on the news about "productivity gains" in various industries... well, that's fewer people doing the same or more work than more folks did previously. Folks are working themselves in to an early grave. Stress related illness is one of the biggest causes of ill health in America. Our pain killer industry is larger than many countries GNP. Why do we need so many pain killers in the first place?

So a practice such as Aikido, which can feed your soul, your intellect, is good exercise, and provides a great social community is placed behind your job in priority. That job is probably killing you, for most folks involves selling or producing something that is completely non-essential or is even unhealthy, and the doing of which enriches your life not at all. And we let this happen with little or no complaint.

This whole thing of "I don't have time to train more" is simply symptomatic of larger issues in our society. We are more than what we do in our jobs. Yet almost everyone I know would be doing something different if he or she could do so. Everyone. has a whole list of things that they'd like to be doing but feel they can't. If only I'd win the lottery, then I could do ....

If there ever was a time in history when the average person did have the time and the means to pursue something beyond basic survival, that time is now. The whole system is set up to make a very few richer and richer and yet the vast majority allow themselves to be sucked into the belief that they have to work harder and harder just to get by. But this is an illusion. The only reason you are asked to work harder and harder is so that the top five percent of the wealthy can GROW their wealth. Not just maintain it, but grow it. And everyone says that they can't train more, or whatever it is that they REALLY rather be doing.

This whole society is pretty crazy. At its heart is a set of assumptions that could easily be different if people understood how they are manipulated and collectively decided to change things. But I don't see these things changing any time soon. In fact I see it getting a lot worse in the future.

It's always been about time and money... When you have time you often don't have the money, when you have the money you frequently don't have the time. That's why throughout history much of the spiritual work was done in monasteries and religious communities because the could economically afford the "leisure time" required to do something other than produce food and shelter.

We are a richer society than any in history ever dreamed of and yet will still tell ourselves we don't have time for these amazing things we could be doing rather than killing ourselves to produce ever increasing profit for a ruling class of wealthy individuals and corporations.

Ok, that's it for the "Lefty" tirade. It's just hard to watch how people buy in to these myths... myself included. I think we really need to question all of our assumptions. If things keep going they way they are, no one will be doing anything seriously... It will all be hobbyists in everything, that and marketers... A whole world full of hobbyists and marketers. Nothing of real depth can survive in that environment.

George S. Ledyard
Aikido Eastside
Bellevue, WA
Aikido Eastside
AikidoDvds.Com
  Reply With Quote