I’m not going to mention his name, because I’m not sure he’d want that.<\/p>\n
He’d been training a long time, and not just Aikido. So long, in fact, that his instructor, a senior American practitioner, once referred to him<\/em> as sempai.<\/p>\n The day he came I was teaching. We were cubs back then, that day, rolling and tumbling on the mat. Not him, though, as he watched us training, off to the side. He was a wolf.<\/p>\n So one day he’s teaching bokken and I was there. I was impatient\u00a0then, and sure of myself, when he walked over to demonstrate.<\/p>\n It’s hard to describe what happened. I doubt he even remembers it. But I do.<\/p>\n I held my bokken before me, the way I was taught, the blade extending outward, my wrist slightly turned. I projected from my center. It was, I remember thinking, a solid and impenetrable barrier. With time enough and patience, I could almost keep the world at bay.<\/p>\n The cut was immediate, decisive. So quickly did the blade drop, that I had no time to think, to even breathe. As the moment passed, and my breath returned, I felt the tip of his sword resting lightly against my trachea.<\/p>\n Nowadays when I teach bokken, I demonstrate the movements, again the way I was taught. Sometimes, though, I’ll stop, and think back to that day.<\/p>\n “You have to understand,” I tell them, “this happens very fast…”<\/p>\n And then I’ll wait, and look, and see if they understand. And sometimes, as I watch them, I’ll see my younger self: eager to train, quick to answer, and confident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m not going to mention his name, because I’m not sure he’d want that. He’d been training a long time, and not just Aikido. So long, in fact, that his instructor, a senior American practitioner, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5004,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jerry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2029"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7316,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029\/revisions\/7316"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}