After every Tuesday night’s training with Sempai Dan, we seem to sit and discuss Aikido one on one. I look forward to our training together on the mat, but I really enjoy our conversations about the art of Aikido. Our take on where we are both at in our Aikido training , him 15-16yrs and me just a mere 10yrs have proven to be an interesting platform for our journey. With all of our combined years of experience ,I think we really had a really great disscussion that will be the meat of many of my up comming classes at Shin Gane Dojo. Moreover, our discussion will bring many more Questions to Sensei Freeman and Shihan Seagal at our up comming test at Sensei Seagal”s house.
Anyway, we both were talking about how we felt about the effectiveness of our personal Aikido on the street. We bounced things off each other that would play an important role in the situation. The opponent’s skill levels in other martial arts, such as karate, golden gloves boxing and of course the mix martial arts of cage fighting and such all the way down to a bar brawler. For most martial artists this seems to be the question of the ages pondered by all practitioners in all the levels of their chosen art.
I must say we both had some very good answers for each other. But the one question that loomed over us like an opponent hiding in the shadows was still there to be asked. I mustered up the courage to ask my sempai at the end of our conversation the question. What part of his Aikido would he use outside with the most effective result? We both sat and pondered the question looking at each other to answer. Then the answer came from sempai Dan (he is presently the senior student of Sensei Freeman). He felt that his capability to the skill level of his opponent and the surrounding situation has been very enlightened by his aikido. To the point that he would be able to handle a situation long before it ever got out of hand. In his own words he felt that just having that skill alone was worth the price of admission.
I sat there and smiled thinking just how wonderful that was to have. I could not have agreed more. I than realized, I had the same mind set, but Hier findet man alle erdenklichen Roulette Varianten in hochster Qualitat und benutzerfreundlichster Aufbereitung. did not put the same value on it. In my earlier years as an aikidoka I always focused on technique thinking that is what was most important to have on the street. It is not how good your technique is but how you perceive your opponents… and the world about you.
I am in the middle of a book entitled “Miyamoto Musashi-His Life and Writings”. I remembered a paragraph in this book I had read when Sempai Dan gave me what I felt was a high level answer for that ongoing question. I went back and found the paragraph in the book and reread it with a different mindset.
In the paragraph, it is said that Musashi learned to practice “mikiri” after the age of 30. Until then he went looking for duals to fight just to prove the point of his expertise with a sword. He succeeded in having over 60 duals in his life. I’m not sure , but I don’t think Musashi had many duals after the age of 30.
The Quote from the paragraph goes as follows:
“It was undeniable that Musashi never made a mistake in accurately assessing the strength of an adversary-this made it possible for him to avoid fighting an enemy capable of defeating him. The word mikiri became the established term for characterizing this particular acuity of Musashi’s perception. “
I just had to post this for Sempai Dan. His perception of the question was in fact mikiri. Just how cool is that?
“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
