There’s a part in the movie, The Last Samurai, where Tom Cruise’s character is being schooled by his rival in the art of the Japanese sword (kenjutsu). He is instructed not to concentrate on extraneous things such as the people watching or whether he wins or looses the match. And of course, after hearing the advice, “too many minds,” Tom Cruise, with all of about six weeks of training is able to best his opponent who lived his entire life by the sword. Well, it is Tom Cruise after all.
Funny thing is, I received very similar advice from my aikido teacher in Japan many years before that movie came out. I was living with my family in Misawa, a small town in the northern region of Honshu. I was there on a four-year military assignment and wanted to make the most of my time, so I dabbled in as many Japanese martial arts as I could, hoping to amass a great deal of knowledge and skill before our time was up. As you might imagine, this didn’t go very well.
I was fascinated with aikido and its roots in sword culture, so I also studied an art dedicated to the drawing of the sword, iaido. In years past, I had the opportunity to train with the U.S. Olympic Judo Team, so when I found a large judo dojo in Misawa, I trained there when I could. I also briefly studied a little known, but devastating martial art called Shorinji Kempo, a mixture of karate, jujutsu and kung-fu. Aside from my full-time job, I was training off base five to six days a week, which would have been fine had I not had a wife and two small children. Does older and wiser you ever want to go back and slap some sense into younger and dumber you? Happens to me a lot.
Aikido remains the most difficult martial art I have ever studied. To do it well takes exquisite timing and precision. Your posture, stance, focus and mental clarity all have to click at the same time, every time if you expect to make any of it work the way it was intended. The best analogy I have is this: learning karate is like learning almost any rock song from the 70s and 80s…if you know three or four guitar chords, you can play just about anything. Learning aikido is like learning jazz. Enough said. If studied correctly, the art will push a person to their physical and mental limits. The ability to defend yourself with aikido takes years…personally, I would say about a decade of consistent, dedicated training. Most likely, this was by design. Suffice to say, aikido takes tremendous focus.
But I didn’t realize this in my all-too frequent impatience as a young man. And my lack of commitment to the art along with an unhealthy ego prohibited me from grasping the techniques and finger points. I trained hard, but floundered constantly. Other forms had come relatively easy to me because they relied on things like strength, speed and “emotional content” as the great Bruce Lee once mentioned. Learning how to hit someone is a fairly straight forward process with the right teacher. Learning how not to hit someone…well, that’s a whole different ball of wax. And I sucked at it. I mean, I was really bad.
My teacher, Yamamoto-san, saw my constant frustration and was not surprised when I told him I was leaving the dojo to purse other martial arts. In what I’m sure was very poor Japanse, I attempted to tell him that I didn’t understand aikido and that I wanted to study arts that made more sense to me. He listened and then said in English, “Too many rabbits. Aikido, judo, iaido…too many rabbits.” He told me that it didn’t matter what I decided to study as long as I gave it 100% of myself. That, he said, is the only way a person can learn anything of value. That night, as I walked home from the dojo, I knew where I needed be.
I spent the remaining three years in Japan focused solely on aikido. I also spent a lot more time with my family and I paid attention to my military career. Because I had an inkling of smarts, I followed Yamamoto-san’s advice and chased after the important rabbits. “Too many minds” sounds cool, but “too many rabbits” is far more appropriate. All things in life are constantly moving forward and on different paths. When we learn how to focus on the essentials, other things typically seem to fall into place. Tough lesson. I’d like to say I’ve learned it well, but I can’t.
As I write these words, I still find myself chasing too many rabbits. Too many things to think about, too many paths to take. Life would be a lot easier if it was like karate; the fastest route between two points is a straight line. But life is more like aikido; circles upon circles. I read once that fighting an aikido master is like trying to solve a riddle that cannot be solved. In my lifetime, I have experienced this phenomenon with a handful of people. Perhaps, if I had stayed on one path, I could count myself among them. I can’t say that either.
But aikido and faith have taught me how to focus on the important things; love, family, friendships. Physical skill is great while it lasts but it depends on the body which eventually closes certain doors. Financial successes is also very nice but exacts a certain toll depending on what your idea of “success” is. As Denzel Washington once noted, “You don’t see a U-Haul behind a hearse.”
So, my friends, I hope we all focus what little time we have on the rabbits that mean the most.
Dave Magliano
Tatsu Dojo
Jissenkan Budo
Dojo Cho
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