the phagos blog

Last night’s jujitsu class was great, I refined some of my techniques, and learned something I’d like to share.

Last night we worked on the shime (pronounced shimay) list, which cover choking and sometimes locking techniques.  At the end of class, sensei told us that the shime list is about developing rhythm and timing, and that each technique is done in discrete steps, you have to do this first to get to this second, which sets up the third thing, and so on, until the technique is completed.  Sensei then asked us what we learned that night from the class.  I told him I learned about movement, that if you flub up early in the sequence, it doesn’t matter how well you do the rest of it, because it won’t work right.  Which is true, as he confirmed right after I said it.

I thought about that for a while after I left the dojo last night, and I’ve noticed that life works the same way.  It matters to me, because it explains what I’m going through at the moment.  I’ve cleaned a lot of stuff out of my house and my life, and the process of cleaning out the house is getting close.  But there’s still the process of cleaning out my life to finish, and it’s going to take a while.

You see, financially, I have issues.  During an earlier sequence in my life, I allowed someone else to do things that I have to pay for now.  I’m doing my best to sever all the links to my ex-wife, but this is a big one, she caused a lot of it.  I did too, when I allowed her to do that, so I can’t push the responsibility to her.  She may have done some of the things that have put me in this situation, but because I let her, I may as well have done it myself.

The great thing about life is that I can always choose to start a new sequence, and I have.  And someday soon, this current set of sequences will play themselves out and the sequences I have started now will become the dominant theme of my life.  Life is movement; you have to finish taking the fall before you can get back up and do another technique, although some techniques have their origin in the fall.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 16th, 2006 at 9:54 pm and is filed under life, martial arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.