Some people who joined our dojo never expected to join. One guy used to bring his kids in on Saturdays. Their mom brought them during the week, but on the weekends, on Saturday mornings, it was Dad’s turn. He was a big guy. The kind you notice as being big, with a chest and forehead like a bull. Like he was bench-pressing minivans for his workout. He started out thinking karate was a nice kid activity. He thought it was good for his boys, because they didn’t have a way to toughen up like he had when he was a kid.
He grew up on a farm a few miles from the dojo. His family had some of the best farmland in the valley, on the bank of the Connecticut River. Most of the farmers in the valley at that time were recently arrived immigrants, grandparents and great grandparents of the people whose kids are growing up today.
As he tells it, in those days everybody worked, all the time. There was always a job to do, and everyone was expected to pitch in. So when he was 10 or 11 years old, he did the simple, hard, repetitive tasks that come with farm life. When he was sent to the barn to cut the tops off of the carrots, this was not, as he puts it, like getting a bunch of them ready for soup. This was a vast heap of carrots, a mountain of them to a ten-year-old, a harvest’s worth, which filled the stalls of the barn to overflowing. He pulled up a stool. Picked up a knife. And started cutting. Throw the tops into an empty stall nearby and the put the cut carrots into another pile. And cut. And throw. Cut. Throw. All day. Till it was done. His whole family worked from morning to night, he says, and they were strong.
When a goat ran off or a stump needed to be pulled from a field, his father just told him to do it. These were considered good jobs for a kid. When he screwed up the penalty was: labor. There was always something to do.
For him, growing up, effort and boredom were always combined, and always present.
He did not want to do this all his life, he said to himself. There’s got to be something better to do than farming. This was around the same time that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts took that farm away from his family. It was a successful farm. It provided a livelihood and a home for his family, and had for a generation. But the highway was coming through. The state took the farm. Eminent domain. For the general good. And they didn’t pay what it was worth. And yet this man’s family had worked it so hard; it was theirs.
But there was nothing they could do to stop it. The farmers were helpless. The lawyers held all the power. Everything was up to the lawyers. This was about the time when his family told him: You be a lawyer.
How one would go about this, he had no idea. But he was determined to do it. So he applied the ethos that had once gotten him through farm work to get through law school. He said it made law school seem pleasant by comparison.
One day he brought his children to the dojo. Growing up in suburban comfort, they didn’t have work to do every day. They had activities. And he watched them practice karate, sitting on the bench at the side of the room with the other parents. For some parents, it was the only break they would get that day. Some read. Some took off and jogged for 45 minutes. He thought he would like to try karate. It seemed absurd at first. He didn’t feel any need for self-defense training. He hadn’t met anyone (other than the male members of his own family) he couldn’t snap like a dry twig. But there was something great about it. Something familiar and something missing from his life.
For a lawyer, he said, the day never ends. You just stop. But the feeling of getting the job done, the satisfaction of having the truck loaded, the season over, being exhausted, being done for the day, never happens. In karate it does. You go home exhausted and come back ready. There’s a pulse. And you can be tough, as aggressive as you want, and you don’t have to go to jail when you’re done. And you don’t have to make a big deal out of it. No badges, no awards, no nothing. Just the satisfaction of knowing that the job, the training period, is done.
A lot of the farm work that, a generation ago, was done by farm kids, today is done by migrant workers. The kids who grew up on those farms, by choice or circumstance, now have no farms to put their effort into. Half a dozen of the black belt instructors in the school grew up on farms in the Valley.
Physical strength, determination in the face of difficulty or pain, inner stability, are qualities they all have. Those qualities are what they have used to succeed in their own karate practice, what they taught to the other dojo members in their classes, and what works for them in life. It doesn’t take values imported from Asia to make practice valuable, successful, or genuine.
Our mental habits, the values we inherit, propel us, even though the form they take may be totally unexpected.
An emergency room can offer an opportunity to help people in crisis. It can also seem like drudgery or a siege. The river of suffering is never-ending. But for some ER doctors, like anyone who is obliged to help each day, their own pain can from time to time eclipse that of the people who come to them in need. This was explained to me.
That this is a function of mind, not outer circumstance, is not obvious. Tell a high school teacher with an out of control class, or a heartbroken lover, that their suffering is a function of their state of mind and, in the midst of difficulty, it will be too hard for them to grasp. If they do nothing, they will probably keep suffering. However, if they take action, in the right way, they will start to see some light.
A member of the dojo sees 40 patients a day in the emergency room of a city hospital. A few he can help. Many people who come to his emergency room come not because they are facing a life-threatening emergency, but because they are upset. Almost every day some woman arrives by ambulance having faked a fainting spell during a fight with a boyfriend. People come in with constipation and demand a CAT scan. People come in sad or frustrated or lonely and make hysterical demands. Knowing that this is a symptom of their helplessness does not make it any easier for him to deal with. Because people curse at him when he refuses unnecessary treatments or tests. It became a personal struggle. His level of anxiety became intolerable.
After years of this, conflict became his mode of operation not just with patients, but with staff and administrators. Everyone wanted something from him, but few seemed to appreciate what he was doing for them or their families.
He joined the dojo. He was angry. It showed in his kata. Because each person is practicing the same sequence of movements, it is easy to spot the subtle variations that reveal the inner life of each person. If someone is lax or tense, impulsive or shy, aggressive or timid, guarded or open, phony or honest, happy or sad, lazy, courageous, angry, or greedy, it will be immediately visible in their kata. If they persevere, the kata will have a tonic effect on their body and emotions, an effect that goes deeper and deeper the longer they practice. This ER doctor trained hard at the dojo every day.
The pressure to move well, to meet the demands of training, demands made by your body, your instructor, your opponent or training partners, changes you. Your own effort to learn what to do and to do it well—to gain speed, strength and skill, and to eliminate the gap between your intention and your action—makes you stronger and humbler at once.
What’s there to prove, if you’ve really got the goods? Nothing. You can relax. You won’t hold excess tension in your body after a hard workout. The tension drops away. And the relaxation that naturally results feels good.
He experienced this. He returned to the dojo day after day and worked out hard again. That pulse began to regulate his body and mind so he could relax, and push hard, and relax again.
What impressed him, even before he had learned much karate, was that in the dojo he worked with people who were all trying to do their best. That came as a relief. Although each person, individually, may have been strong or weak, a great athlete or a desk jockey, as a group they were all moving forward, focused not on aches and pains and obstacles, but on being free of them. In the dojo, he had found people who realized that aches and pains were part of daily life. People who respected each other and themselves. Who did not presume that someone else ought to do things for them, but who were willing to do for themselves and for others, any time. The restraint the senior members showed in placing demands on the newer members made it possible for each person to learn easily and help generously where it was really needed. No one in need was ignored. No one presumed upon the generosity of the stronger individuals.
Here was a model he could apply to the emergency room. Even if he could not change his working environment, he had found a way to change the way he dealt with it. And he had the composure he needed to implement the model. Be cool. Be rational. Be respectful. Talk to people. See where they are coming from. Now, when the man who slashes his abdomen open once every month or so and stuffs lifesavers, utensils, tools, and pamphlets into the wound, comes in to the emergency room for treatment, he just takes care of the guy as best he can.
When he wades into the river of suffering that never stops, the suffering that appears to be self-inflicted, which once appeared to be an assault on society, a waste and abuse of the hospital’s resources, now appears differently to him. When people arrive in pain or crazy, begging for a witness to their misery and confusion, he does what he can do. |