Appreciations (10) – Just walk on by…motives (un)fulfilled

Appreciations (10) – Just walk on by…motives (un)fulfilled.

Torrey Orton

August 26, 2009

I went out this morning at 7:15 to pull some weeds in the lawn. They are egregiously big things which shade the resilient grasses into nothingness after a month's growth. It's not like I just noticed them today. I've noticed them for a month, having decimated their tribe a few months ago with a heavy session of pulling, root and branch. The act is a wonderfully refreshing test of hand /wrist strength and a certain tenacity in the face of roots natural resistance to eradication. The branches fail easily which actually defends the roots from my efforts. Mostly I win.

For the effort, I got not only death to the weeds but also this boy's delight of dirty hands and nails needing themselves a serious brushing to return to sociability. If only I remembered this collateral effect I love I might more often grab the offenders early in their life-cycle and so eradicate rather than just interrupt their progress. There are a bunch of similar activities which I almost always like doing and enjoy the after-feel of. Among them are: aikido technique practice, cutting the grass by hand, skiing (cross country and downhill), and bushwalking with a stiff climb in it. Daily stuff like dishwashing holds a similar place in my life.

From motivation to motion

This brings me to the point of this appreciation: what a fine turn of awareness into intent it often is that brings something from the edge of possibility to the range of probability and then into an undertaken and completed task. The possibility-probability transition seems to be the longest for many highly discretionary tasks.

For instance: I can let a weed go for months, reminded more or less daily when I look out the door; the box(s) of empty wine bottles on the way to neighbour Etty for recycling move a bit more briskly. Ironing is somewhere in between the weeds and the recycled. If there's too little or too much time, I avoid with reluctant energy. Mostly, I do this by forgetting, which is irritating when I remember that I had an hour here of there over the week languishing for a utility to be fulfilled. I 'used' it on snoozes or another modest editorial foray from the world's presses.

A case of aikido interrupted

This is all a bit to do with subtleties of my motivation. For example, I decided last night I would practice my aikido technique this morning. I only do this early, before eating. I did not get there today. Here are the checkpoints along the way to the trip I did not take (this failed intention occurs about once a week, with one or two successes, too). I've counted 11 potential disconnect points along the road – always there for every trip, hence perfectly envisageable when I don't take it.

1. The alarm
   
2. Getting up
   
3. Go to bathroom
   
4. Dressing
   
5. Picking up jo and sweatband
   
6. Going out
   
7. Walking to park (3 mins)
   
8. Warm-up 90 seconds
   
9. 21 kata each repeated 5 times (25 mins)
   
10. 31 kata sequence repeated 1-3 times (3-5 mins)
    
11. Walking home (5 mins)

A feature of these potential disconnect points is that they require transitions of time, space and mind to accomplish them. Every transition contains at least the moments William Bridges (and Kurt Lewin before him with unfreeze / change / refreeze) popularised three decades ago:
Endings, Neutral Zone, New Beginnings. Each of the 11 change points in my aikido practice is a transition. Therefore, there's a big opportunity for distraction or spontaneous variation (home of insight, creation and their friends).

…building blocks of life

One of the points of aikido practice is to make excellent moves routine. This requires constant attention to perfect form, followed by the assumption that perfect form cannot be achieved; it can only be maintained with vigilance (hear an obsession coming on?). My interest here is not myself, but the exploration of the delicacies of distraction, interruption, and creation which surround the engagement with established or establishing routines – the building blocks of life.

Self in the way of action

In general, there are a number of struggle themes / patterns around these distraction opportunity points. These include the struggle with my disengaged, distant relationship style (dismissive avoidant?), my strong inclination to large picture concepts and abstraction (INTP), my do-nothing reflective/contemplative self, and my worrier approach to work performance. Recently, I've been very interruptable by ideas for writing. I often get stuck in writing an article and then I suddenly see my way into and through it at odd times. These are notably ones when I'm doing something active, but measured – bushwalking, aikido, weed pulling, etc. Gross muscle activities seem good for thinking without intending to.

All of this applies to my vocational cores as well – the various helping/thinking/creating things that are me without my choice. But, some of the maintenance tasks (keeping case notes, organising data files) around them are more discretionary than driven. Therein is one of my motivational outs. Back to walking by things like weeds. Walking by seems more likely to occur the more transitions there are in our lives. Transitions often offer a promise of change, difference, and may provide instead breakage and fragmentation of our continuities.

The virtue of trying

And herewith is one of the implications, so far, of this walk into domesticity. For me, to keep trying is critical in doing new things. Aikido and writing are the most recent additions to my daily life. Not that I do them daily, but they are in my mind, I am working them to varying degrees. So, while I often fail to get up, or to get going once up, I almost never fail to catch an idea, and will even put Aikido second for that. It's the trying that counts, as long as I am trying about something that matters.

It seems to me the common perception that goals and objectives are the way to change / improvement is largely hollow. The hollow part is where the fundamental motivation – the motivation by vocation or value(s) – is missing. It cannot be replaced by short-term goals and performances, unless these are understood as practice for the real thing.

Getting good at trying is one thing I need to learn to teach others, while keeping in my own view the vision and practice of adequate trying myself. Much of the self-focussed reverie above begins specification of the internal and external contexts which need to be identified and engaged to increase motivated change – the direction for our trying.

Appreciations (2) …Learning aikido by submitting to mastery

Appreciations (2) …Learning aikido by submitting to mastery
Torrey Orton
May 14, 2009

This is less an appreciation than an appreciating – a developmental, making process rather than a summary or aesthetically contemplative one. For I have certainly not mastered aikido or even a small part of it, though I have passed my first grading 6+ months ago. And I continue after two years to find little, and sometimes big, refinements or completions of the practices which have required an unconscious transition to a different mental space to even notice that they were possible.

Submission and learning:

One of the key learning steps is being willing to learn. This means, in part, submitting myself to someone else’s expertise, superiority, good intentions. Recently I was telling people I met at a lunch about my aikido commitment and volunteered that one aspect of interest to me after 9 months practice was consciously submitting myself to another’s leadership. One of the listeners blurted: “I couldn’t do that”. Therein probably lies a story of self-entrapment in the folds of self-protection, but...

Repeatedly, I remind myself to just do what Sensei is doing each day and everything will come together. Of special concern is remembering the order of practices which partly controls access to the inner contents of each one. It has become apparent that consciously struggling for the order – making notes, or similar – does not work for me. Or, rather, that just going along brings everything around again and again, so struggle for control is unnecessary. The video of Sensei’s Sensei demonstrating the 21 jo suburi practices helps. I don’t often use it now, though it’s on my laptop desktop and easily playable anytime I’m home (or away).

At the end of the morning meditation routine (which is the entry to the jo work each day), Sensei bows to the aikido school’s founder whose picture is hung on a wall with ceremonial incense burning on a table to one side. This ritual, too, I am not yet committed to after 8 months of participating in the meditation (which was not a part of my initial training, though I had experience with it intensively 30 years ago). I’m aware of resisting this last (?) submission (is it really the last one?) , while realising as I write that submission is a means of honouring the authority, expertise, etc. of the Sensei and his submission to the authority, expertise of his Sensei, and so on. ... a way of respecting the price in submission to the discipline of the school that they paid to become good enough for us to learn from them.

I am also aware that displaying this submission before other students, including my wife, is embarrassing in some way I don’t yet grasp. I undertook one morning when only I and Sensei were training to try getting on my knees at the close of the mediation ritual acknowledgment of the dojo’s founders in Japan, but couldn’t kneel the hardwood floor...so back to my chair.

Submission as offer and undertaking

It seems that submission goes in two different but mutually dependent directions: it’s two common meanings are (a) offer or propose, as in submit a report or an application or a rendition of the jo suburi under the eye of the Sensei (or, precisely, for the eye of the Sensei); this I did to pass my first grading. And, the second is (b) undertaking for another, as in submit to their command, direction, etc.(which I do in every training whether in group or alone).

So, when I take up aikido I both undertake the command of the Sensei and offer myself to him, or put myself in his hands. This is probably the source of the authority which allows me to follow his lead even when it is ‘wrong’ – that is, when he departs from routines, styles, orders of activity which previously had been the behavioural foundation of the discipline. And which made it learnable to a large extent in the initial phases where the performance models were not enough in mind to be accessed quickly and fluently.

Inhibitions to submission

Finally, for the moment, what inhibits submission? What makes “I couldn’t do that” a likely response from some people which also expresses part of me in resistance, like them!? In myself I find that resistance to a fully compliant submission I mentioned earlier – to honouring the elders who are the origin of the aikido I study. At the aesthetic level, it involves moves I’d feel somewhat silly to be seen doing. At another, ethnic perhaps, the manner of honouring is very non-Anglo.

In any event, I can say that part of me is under-developed (or over-developed looked at from another perspective). Perhaps it’s that I would feel shrunken in some respect by participating?? That’s what just came to mind and I’ve learned to follow the tracks of things which come to mind since that’s the only access to the subconscious I carry with me all day every day. But, on noticing that, I also notice that what I may be resisting is the submission to an imperfect god, for the practices continue to change in their home place as much as in the variations of my Sensei here – as they must.

So, what am I submitting to exactly – a discipline which is definite but changeable, which is demanding but relaxed, which is paradoxical to some extent? An effort for perfect form which realises that it can never be achieved...there is only the trying. A parallel universe to everyday life.

At various times each of these three has been my Sensei, but these Sensei’s Sensei is the man in the middle. They are, from l to r: Sean Seibold, Simon Harris, John Rigopoulos in Japan in late 2008.