Tomoe Nage And Sumi Gaeshi Were Actually Two Of My Strongest Throws When I Did Judo Regularly. The Beauty

Tomoe Nage and Sumi Gaeshi were actually two of my strongest throws when I did Judo regularly. The beauty of sacrifice throws is their complete surrender to the flow of your opponent, giving them what they want while completely tossing them aside. I have a much longer post on Daoism and martial arts planned for later, but this should suffice for now.

My new computer wallpaper. This is one of my favorite throws. 

While I'm not advising you to assault the opposing attorney in the middle of court, I do believe in following your passions, wherever they may be. But seriously, there is a time and place for things.

83. HOWARD THURMAN: Ask yourself

The Importance of Importance

or, Significant Figures or, The Power of Perspective

One of the truly wonderful things about life is the simple vastness of the universe in which we live. From the endless reaches of the cosmos to the infinitesimal depths of subatomic mysteries, it is easy for many of us to forget just how much other stuff (read: not immediately relating to human life) there is out there. But for some, it is frighteningly easy to drift in the other direction; to feel lost in a sea of other people and other things, to feel utterly alone or insignificant in the midst of the much bigger and scarier world out there. But as the good Doctor once said, “I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important.”

In the grand scheme of things, the path of the universe will carry on regardless of what choices people make, but rather than looking at it like every choice is meaningless, we must understand that each choice still has a profound impact on the people around us and the world we live in. It’s a bit of doublethink, perhaps, that our choices both matter and don’t matter at the same time. But a good analogy would be the trillions of drops of water that make up a stream. Throw a rock in the water, and it will still continue to flow, completely unimpeded by the stone. Even if you were to create a dam and try to totally stop the water, eventually it will pool up and overflow, either going around the dam or pushing through tiny little cracks. The water will always flow onward, as is the nature of a stream.

But from that one thrown stone, you’ve disrupted and changed the path of countless tiny little drops of water. They’ve gone right when they were planning to go left, some are forced backwards up the stream from the splash, and some are even taken completely out of the stream and tossed onto the shore. And of course no drop is ever alone. The bonds between water molecules are remarkably strong, and the movement of each little H2O tugs and moves dozens more around it. This is the world we see, the world we live in. Even if we don’t recognize it, everything we do has a rippling effect on the lives of everyone around us; some on people we know, some on people we will never meet. Those familiar with the Butterfly Effect will recognize the potential consequences that even a seemingly insignificant choice can have.

I believe that it is best to take balanced perspective of both such viewpoints. We must always strive to realize that the world will continue to turn, that our movements are only one part of a much greater flow that exists far above us. Our troubles, our fears, our frustrations; these are all really not as large as we imagine them. But, lest we feel too small and lost in the river, we must also understand the impact our choices have on others. Of course, this means it is imperative that we always take care to try and see what consequences our actions might have. We must see the truth of the situation before we simply act on our first instinct (more on impulse and daoism at a later date). But it also means that we have incredible potential to improve the lives of those around us, and that others can improve ours. Just as the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, every one of us has the possibility of creating great and wonderful things from even the smallest acts of good.

A New Year

It is a new year, I suppose.

And yet the world turns on.

Changing the Moment to Be in the Moment

or, Stepping Off the Path to See the Path or, How Habit Doesn't Equate to Harmony

Well, today marks the beginning of another semester. Even though I've been very sleepy all day from working all night, it's good to be back at school. The professor had us go through a very interesting exercise today, one that really made me stop and think for a moment. After some general warm up figure studies, he asked us all to switch gears and draw a 15 minute pose with our non-dominant hand. As you can probably imagine, we were all pretty stunned at first, and then incredibly resistant to the idea. It was awkward, it was mind-bending, and it felt more than a little foolish. But we all wanted to be professional and see the task done.

After the pose finished, we took a break from drawing and he had everyone do a quick walk around the room to see the work of our classmates. Unbelievably, the majority of the work was fantastic, on par or even better than the drawings we had done earlier in the class with our dominant hand. The professor explained in thus: because of the strangeness, because of how sure we all were about how terrible the piece would look, we all subconsciously pay that much more attention to what we are drawing. Every line suddenly becomes of the utmost importance as we struggle to make the charcoal go where we want it to go on the paper. By putting ourselves in the most uncomfortable of situations, we are forced to exist entirely within the present moment, unable to be distracted by the day-to-day musings that we can generally handle while drawing normally.

Of course, the goal of this exercise wasn't to convince us to draw off-hand forever. The main point, as he put it, was to apply this mode of thinking every time we go back to drawing, especially when we switched back to our dominant hand in the next pose. Every stroke is important, every shape is vital. We cannot let ourselves get too habituated in our present situation, or we risk wandering off the Path without ever realizing it. Always mind the present waking moment, even when doing something we've done a thousand times before. Chop wood, carry water.

Truth and Arrogance

No matter how the wind howls, the mountain cannot bow to it.

When I was a child, I thought this was an issue of pride, of "face" as we say in Chinese culture. That the emperor was a divine symbol of the Chinese people, that to bow in submission to a conqueror would do nothing but forfeit the soul of the kingdom to shame. Perhaps this is still partly true. After all, it's not as if other lives would be spared had the emperor chosen to humiliate himself, while much (if not all) of the respect and faith placed in him by the people would have been lost. Perhaps the emperor had already recognized that Shan Yu had returned with little more than a hunting party, not even capable of conquering a single city, much less all of China.

But there's more to it than simply putting on a strong face, I think. There's that line that's tossed around in films constantly, "We do not negotiate with terrorists." To negotiate means to recognize the other party as at least some kind of equal. And while this may or may not be true in the case of real-life issues of terrorists, in the context of Disney's Mulan I believe it's more a question of universal truths. Shan Yu, having taken the castle by storm and cornered the emperor, asks not for a display of equality, but for submission, to prove his worth as a mighty warrior and conquering lord. But what authority does the emperor recognize in Shan Yu? A powerful leader and dangerous foe, of course, but these things mean little to him. Threatening his life means little as well in the grand scheme of the universe, a truth which eludes Shan Yu to the end.

A telling reversal occurs at the finale when the emperor bows to Mulan, heroine of the day and savior of China. He bows to her before her wisdom, her tenacity, and her virtue. These are things he recognizes as worthy of his respect and humility. The mountain, it would seem, will only bow when it has something greater than itself to bow to.