Luck, fate, and other weird stuff

The last time I was in Japan, Nagato sensei mentioned he doesn't meditate. He felt no need to since training in itself was meditation, "moving meditation," as some call it. I have never been a proponent of traditional meditation, staying aware and activated during training is hard enough, harder than most give it credit for. The moment we start thinking, the moment we begin to drift away from the situation, is the very time we create a looming threat.

Most of the time, nothing bad occurs and we come back to the moment a few moments later. But it takes only a single time for those loose moments to line up and intersect with another to cause problems. Accidents don't just happen, accidents need opportunity, just like good Taijutsu. And when we take ourselves out of the moment, we drop our guard and provide an opening for that opportunity. Sometimes our thoughts don't get in the way, but learned behavior, occurring when we trust our partner, maybe a little too much, and take for granted the inherent danger in training; our better nature actually working against us.

In training Taijutsu, we must remember our mind and body learn differently and not always at the same rate. The body communicates and our mind interprets - nerve sensitivity and pain is the universal language of the body telling our brains something feels good or not. Science is only now looking into how the mind can actually communicate and control the body as well. After training for some time, the body knows what to do even if we don't cognitively recognize it, which is why we sometimes get spikes in our ability - our mind simply catches up to or realizes what our body is already capable of doing. The body will act, as it has been trained to do, even without direct command. When we are not mindful of that disparity, it can lead to harm when least expected.


I don’t believe we should look to control these aspects, that would be dangerous - an attempt to micromanage our better faculties, preprogramming them to ask permission to engage on our behalf even when necessary. Would we want our ‘radar’ to ask permission to tell us of impending danger, or simply inform us before it’s too late? Staying in the moment covers and manages them. That is enough.

Training should be fun, but can sometimes be a tough learning experience. Lessons come in all shapes and sizes and we would be remiss if we only paid attention to those we wanted to remember and ignored accidents as simply “bad luck.” However, “luck,” as the happenstance of opportunity, is arbitrarily assigned good or bad by those receiving it. Rather we should, "meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same" - a chance to stop, turn ourselves away from the mountainside of the great climb, and for a moment choose to look upon Heaven's fateful design.