In this understanding, I believe we can find a deep sense of gratitude and personal responsibility.  Instead of complaining about what should be, we can begin to accept and enjoy what is, even if that’s not always what we think we want: as we reclaim our presence in this moment, we let go of the “shoulds” and sink into the miraculous “is.”  Rather than complaining about how life isn’t fair to us, we can spend our time working to make justice possible for others.  And rather and living our lives as the tragic pawns of of some universal unfairness, we can claim our spectacular birthrights of intellect and compassion to make the world a better place for all.

Benjamin and Rosamund Zander, in their book The Art of Possibility (highly recommended reading, by the way), talk about personal responsibility in much the same way:

Ordinarily we equate accountability with blame and blamelessness, concepts from the world of measurement.  When I blame you for something that goes wrong, I seek to establish that I am in the right — and we all know the delicious feeling of satisfaction there.  However, inasmuch as I blame you for a miserable vacation or a wall of silence — to that degree, in exactly that proportion, I lose my power.  I lose my ability to steer the situation in another direction, to learn from it, or to put us in good relationship with each other.  Indeed, I lose any leverage I may have had, because there is nothing I can do about your mistakes, only mine.

To my way of thinking, this is the warrior’s task to the letter: to maintain a deep sense of personal responsibility that allows us to positively affect the world around us, rather than living as victims of every circumstance that walks by.  In this way our lives become full of power and meaning, and we are free to move and blend with the world around us in true Aiki fashion.  In this way, we become completely responsible and completely free in the same moment.

Keep in mind that I simply set this up so you could order items with our logo: I don’t make this stuff, market it, or make money off of it.  It’s a completely separate business providing these items.  I have ordered a couple of shirts from them and have received high-quality items.  So far, so good.  Perhaps you might find a Christmas present for a TKD-er here.  Happy holidays to all!

“Yesterday we had our child safety assessment which involved both THQ and DHQ. In preparation for it we discovered that while some of the lockers are being used by your students they are not being secured with a lock. For child safety and security reasons any locker that does not have a padlock/combo lock/etc. will be zip tied. In ladies / girls locker room in locker # 10 there is Tae Kwon Do gear. This student can cut the zip tie but will need to put on a lock of her own. On Monday a zip tie will be reattached to the locker if it is not secured with a lock. In the men’s / boys locker room 4 lockers have Tae Kwon Do gear and 2 with kids’ street clothes. Two of the four have locks but were not secured. Please remind your students to also secure their lockers.”

It is going to be a LONG test: I’m betting on 3 – 4 hours.  Get some good nutrition, good hydration, and good rest if you’re planning on testing that day.  And make sure you know your material inside and out.  Forgetting = failing.

Richard Baker Roshi once told of a dream he had: He was trying to find the answer to a question, and the telephone rang. He ignored the phone and focused instead on the question. On the thirtieth ring he picked up the phone, and the answer came to him through the receiver. What he had labeled a distraction was really the point.

– Dairyu Michael Wenger

“Roshi” literally means “old teacher” and is used in the Ch’an (Chinese)/Zen (Japanese) tradition as the title of the teacher and is kind of a “menkyo kaiden” in the Zen world. All of that information is just background and doesn’t really matter that much to the point we’re about to discuss.

The reason that I’m quoting this here is because it rings true to me on the level of my training. How often do we look at the answers as the distractions? For example, you wanted to work on sparring, but we’re doing katas tonight. When can we get to the “real” stuff, you ask yourself? Or, alternately, “sparring doesn’t help me at all: I need to work on katas more before I spar in order to get better at my fighting.” What, you think those thoughts never crossed my mind?

It is the job of the sensei to see — to the best of his or her ability — what you need, and to give it to you — again, to the best of his or her ability. Whether you see it as a distraction or not is really your choice. While I don’t ever suggest that you simply accept what I say as the “law,” or even as right, I do ask you to consider the idea that the “distraction” is the point. I honestly believe that nothing in our system is pointless. I’ve spent a lot of time finding the points, and I have a long way to go in order to find and connect all the dots. So when you rub up against something that feels like a distraction, I would suggest that you take a page out of my book and — before writing off that stuff you don’t like as a distraction — ask yourself what you might be missing. And if you don’t get an answer to that question now, do yourself a favor and ask again in a year or two. (I’ll tell you the answers, but you probably won’t listen — or won’t be able to listen — and that’s ok; that is also part of the process. Really.)

The important part is to stick with the process. Nothing great was ever accomplished easily. Attend to the distractions as though they matter. Because they do. There are no empty moments here: there is only a complete system of martial arts that deserves your complete attention, without distraction.

The Gains of Drudgery
From The Making of Manhood, 1894
By William James Dawson

By drudgery, I mean work that in itself is not pleasant, that has no immediate effect in stimulating our best powers, and that only remotely serves the purpose of our general advancement. Such a definition may not be perfect, but it expresses with reasonable accuracy what we usually understand by the term.

Now, if this is what we mean by drudgery, it is clear that we are all drudges. We all have to do many things, day by day, which we would rather not do. Even in the callings that seem to present the most perfect correspondence between gifts and work, such as those of the writer or the artist, drudgery dogs the heels of all progress…We show some perception of these facts in our common sayings, that easy writing makes hard reading, and what costs a man little is usually worth little. But few of us have any adequate sense of the immense toil which lies behind the brilliant successes of the great artist or famous writer. And the same thing might be said of the lives of great statesmen, politicians, reformers, merchants, and memorable men in all walks of life. Examine such lives, and the amount of prolonged toil which lies behind all the glitter of public fame is enormous, and to the indolent even appalling. If any man of the Elizabethan period gives the impression of having achieved great things with a certain airy ease and instinctive facility of touch, it is Walter Raleigh. Yet it was of Raleigh that Elizabeth said, “he could toil terribly.” The same thing may be said of every great man, so that it is small wonder that we have learned to believe that genius itself is simply an infinite capacity for taking pains.

When a man grumbles about the drudgery of his lot, then I am entitled to conclude that he has not learned the discipline of work, and that it is native indolence rather than suppressed genius which chafes against the limitations of his environment. Browning, in his poem of The Statue and the Bust, has laid down the doctrine that it is a man’s wisdom to contend to the uttermost even for the meanest prize that may be within his reach, because by such strenuous contention manhood grows, and by the lack of it manhood decays.

The clerk who does not strive to be the best clerk in the office, the carpenter who is not emulous of being the best carpenter in the workshop, is not likely to achieve excellence in any other pursuit for which he imagines his superior talents better fitted….I have little faith in the youth who is always crying out against his condition, and telling an incredulous world what great things he could do if his lot were different. The boast of general talents for everything usually resolves itself into particular talents for nothing. The incompetent clerk, in nine cases out of ten, would be equally incompetent as writer, artist, or speaker. If I were adjured to help a youth to some sphere supposed to be better suited to his gifts, I should first of all need to be convinced that he had performed faithfully the duties of the inferior sphere in which he found himself. The superior talent always shows itself in the superior performance of inferior duties. It is the man who is faithful in little things to whom there is given authority over larger things. He who has never learned the art of drudgery is never likely to acquire the faculty of great and memorable work, since the greater a man is, the greater is his power of drudgery.

But the gains of drudgery are not seen only in the solid successes of life, but in their effect upon the man himself. Let me take in illustration a not infrequent case. Suppose a man gives up his youth to the struggle for some coveted degree, some honour or award of the scholarly life. It is very possible that when he obtains that for which he has struggled, he may find that the joy of possession is not so great as the joy of the strife. It is part of the discipline of life that we should be educated by disillusion; we press onward to some shining summit, only to find that it is but a bastion thrown out by a greater mountain, which we did not see, and that the real summit lies far beyond us still. But are we the worse for the struggle? No; we are manifestly the better, for by whatever illusion we have been led onward, it is at least clear that without the illusion we should not have stood as high as we do. So a man may either fail or succeed in gaining the prize which he covets; but he cannot help being the gainer in himself. He has not attained, but he has fitted himself for attaining. It is better to fail in achieving a great thing than to succeed in achieving a little one, and the struggle that fails is, in any case, to be preferred to the stolidity which never aspires. And why? Because the struggle is sure to develop certain great and noble qualities in ourselves. Thus, though such a man may not gain the prize he sought, he has gained a command over his chance desires, a discipline of thought, a power of patient application, a steadiness of will and purpose, which will stand him in good stead throughout whatever toils his life may know in the hidden years which lie before it. And even if he gain the prize he sought, the real prize is found not in a degree, a certificate, a brief taste of applause on a commemoration day, but in the deeper strength of soul, the wider range of wisdom, which the long discipline of unflagging effort has taught him. So true is this, that Lessing, who was among the wisest of thinkers, said, that if he had to choose between the attainment of truth and the search for truth, he would prefer the latter. The true gain is always in the struggle, not the prize. What we become must always rank as a far higher question than what we get.

It is possible to take our existence as a “sacred world,” to take this place as open space rather than claustrophobic dark void. It is possible to take a friendly relationship to our ego natures, it is possible to appreciate the aesthetic play of forms in emptiness, and to exist in this place like majestic kings of our own consciousness. But to do that, we would have to give up grasping to make everything come out the way we daydream it should. So, suffering is caused by ignorance, or suffering exaggerated by ignorance or ignorant grasping and clinging to our notion of what we think should be, is what causes the “suffering of suffering.” The suffering itself is not so bad, it’s the resentment against suffering that is the real pain. This is where I think Kerouac got caught as a Catholic, ultimately, because I don’t think he overcame that fear of the First Noble Truth.

- Allen Ginsberg, American poet

“For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”
— Lev Grossman (The Magicians)