in the context of my own small cosmos, two important things happened last week.

1) spring arrived in chicago. there was that day, that one day when finally the trees went from being black tree skeletons silhouetted against the spring-blue sky to fuzzy green canopies shading out the sky. i wore flip flops to work. flip flops! i dearly love to be barefoot, i take my shoes off every moment i can (under my desk, as soon as i walk into an apartment), and it makes me terribly happy to be able to walk around nearly barefoot in the summers. the fields where we play ultimate turned from mud puddles to emerald green grass seemingly overnight. i am sprouting heirloom tomato, bell pepper, basil and cilantro seeds in my windowsil (the danger of frost not yet being past). summer in chicago makes life good.

2) the other item of note is that i passed my 5th kyu exam in aikido on april 19. i started my aikido training in january of 07, so this represents a big milestone. the way rank work in my dojo, you begin training unranked, then move through the kyu (grades) 5th, 4th, and so on up through 1st kyu. after 1st kyu you test for shodan (first blackbelt), and then most up through the grades of yudansha (blackbelt). most aikido schools don’t use colored belts other than white and black, but it’s the same general notion.

the format of the test, for those not familiar with it, is that each of the students taking a particular test (this time there were three of us testing for 5th kyu) is called up on to the mat. the rest of the school sits in seiza along the edge of the mat, the test committee (made up of the yudansha) sits at one end, sensei sits at the other end. from there we are asked to demonstrate any of a series of techniques. for those that require a partner then another student volunteers. there’s a lot of ritual and a lot of formality. the pressure can be really intense. i remember leaving the first test that i attended (would be a year ago, last april i guess) sort of open-mouthed, thinking, i have to do that?

anyway, i’m copying another passage here that i wrote into my training log. beware a lot of waxing poetic and circular thinking.

april 19. 5th kyu exam.
first, the important news: i passed! this was not a total surprise, i was fairly confident that i was going to pass, but regardless it’s a relief to actually get there and have that validation. i arrived at the dojo early enough to watch & take ukeumi for the kids’ test, which was ridiculously cute. kind of amazing to think that a 6-year old can think that rondori (multiple attackers) is the most fun game ever, when to us adults (well, at least to me) it’s positively terrifying. here’s a rondori clip for you non-aikido folks. note the awesome 80’s hairstyles.

now on to my test. what i was most pleased with myself was the amount of focus i felt out there on the mat. i had a moment or two of blind panic right at the beginning, but after that i felt very calm and focused. i was aware of my uke, aware of Glen calling the test requirements, and aware of Sensei (being called first i ended up in the right-most position on the mat closest to where Sensei was seated, which, as he pointed out, meant i got extra special attention). aside from those three people i was pretty much oblivious to the rest of the room, which was good. i didn’t get tangled up thinking about who was watching me or what i must look like, or if i had screwed up that last technique or forgotten to do something, etc. i didn’t even look over once to see how the other two guys testing with me were doing. (which also means that i never had to cheat and look over at one of them to figure out what a technique was).

there were definitely things i got corrected on, but they were the things i knew i was weak in (inexperienced in suburi, strikes that weren’t sharp/aggressive/martial enough, the occasional extra step that leads to sloppy technique, the proper form for mae ukemi (forward breakfalls), the fact that i nearly always do ushiro kaiten ukemi (backward rolls) on the same shoulder). but i felt like i took notes pretty well and didn’t get flustered or distracted. i was able to take and (hopefully) apply the correction and move on to the next step. i think i even parsed the japanese pretty well, though the tester usually followed the japanese call with some or all of it in english.

the test felt really long. we were out on the mat for more than 40 minutes, by my best estimate. i remember sweat just rolling down the sides of my face flushed red, feeling tired but thank god for my endurance training because i was able to reach down and push through that tired and keep going and keep my focus. if one thing stands out in my memory of watching other tests in the past it is seeing the student testing get physically and mentally exhausted and then just start to check out, lose focus, speed, precision. the endurance training i think really helps with that.

my friend marci kept promising me the value of passing my first rank exam would be that i’d feel more confident. she’s right, but i realize that the confidence doesn’t come from passing the test and knowing that i hold a rank as much as it comes from the mastery of skill that i had to go through in the past month of intense training.

i’m at a new place in my training, now. i feel on the verge of making connections that i didn’t have before. the question is whether i will go forward with it or lose that momentum? aikido has been a big cloud sort of blocking out the sun for the past few weeks, stealing my focus from other parts of my life (which i’ve given over willingly because i wanted this goal). there will be times in the future where tech, or marathon training, or other things will block out the sun and distract me from aikido.

and if i’m going to be serious about this, how many other things will i need to sacrifice to make room for this thing that has muscled its way into my life? i’m lucky that i’ve made some friendships in the dojo in the past few months, because aikido can be really hard to talk about but i often feel like i’m full of thoughts/ideas/questions that i need to process with another person. the nature of training and fighting and conflict. and why i’m doing this in the first place, come to think of it. it’s a martial art. it’s not dance, it’s not tai chi. we don’t learn the kata (forms) to perform them beautifully. we learn them because they are effective. the samuri, whose sword work is one of the sources for aikido’s largely open-hand techniques, used real blades. sharp, killing blades. i feel strongly that one has to examine the root of something in order to understand its fundamental purpose and nature. (e.g., guns were designed to kill living things. that’s what they were made for. any attempt to decorate them, make them into art, distracts from, but does not alter, their fundamental nature as killing machines. if we are going to worship and admire and fetishize them, we should acknowledge that we are fetishizing their killing nature, not just the pearl handle or the flawless steel construction.) so at the root of what i’m doing is the word martial. but aikido is also roughly translated as the Art of Peace (among other things). talk about a contradiction in terms. how do i process this paradox? aikido turns the form inside out, it repurposes the attacking/fighting/killing movements into the art of dealing with conflict in an effective manner with concern for the well-being of the attacker. the founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba (O-Sensei), wrote that “to control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.” that is the nature of aikido. it is fighting repurposed into training. but to what end do we train? see how i go in circles on this?

while i don’t want to get hurt (if we’re being honest here, i’m pretty afraid of getting hurt, which seems logical of course but i don’t think everyone i train with shares that fear), i am tough enough to take a few bumps and bruises, and i realize there is risk in anything worth doing. but aside from not wanting to get hurt, i’m not interesting in fighting, in physically besting my partner on the mat, in risking hurting someone else. and if i just wanted to be sure i could fight off a mugger, i’d take a couple of self-defense seminars, learn how to kick a guy in the balls, and go on my merry way. but aikido is something different. it is the path, not the end, that has the value. it turns out that having a goal like a kyu exam was important, not because of what i achieved at the testing date but what i achieved in the weeks of training leading up to that goal.

but honestly, do i have the guts, the belly-fire for this? how do i reconcile my own desire for pacifism with the reality of conflict (physical/spiritual/emotional/political) in the world? how will i grow as a person from studying this? will my belief in peaceful negotiation be strengthened as it is challenged or revealed as naive fallacy?