The Good Men Project
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No Fear in the Moment
Fear is what it is to be human. Yet, I choose who I am going to be in any given moment.
In Aikido practice, the 250-pound dude rushes in to punch my face. I might fear in anticipation of his attack. How strong is he? How quick is he? Is he aiming through my head? Even after over 30 years of Aikido training, those thoughts sometimes arise. I fear before the attack, the fear of impending danger.
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Me Against Me
kyu (white belt) ranks and
dan (black belt) ranks. Each ascending test progressively gained in gravity. Now older, perhaps wiser, I get that I assigned way more significance to those tests than I should have. In the bigger picture, the late Mizukami Sensei didn’t care about the rank. He wanted to know how much I had evolved since my last test, my last zero. After all, everyone’s zero is different.
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Life has no inherent meaning. Werner Erhard said, “The only meaning in life is the meaning that we give it.” We’re right or make others wrong. We dominate or avoid domination. We win or make up for a failure to be, most likely from childhood. Time is also undefeated. So there’s that, too.
I choose who I’m going to be in any given moment. Getting that, I choose, making a difference is my authentic self-expression. Maybe, I leave the world a little greater than when I came into it. At least, I intend to do so.
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jo (wooden staff). In Aikido weapons training, the two opponents are
shite and
seme is equivalent to the
uke, the one who takes falls. The
n
nage in weapons training. Literally,
shite receives the attack from the
seme. That’s the design.
As
shite, I stand in profile with my left foot forward. I give the seme a target: my hip.
Shite and