{"id":358,"date":"2009-12-26T11:32:10","date_gmt":"2009-12-26T16:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/?p=358"},"modified":"2011-06-10T07:59:03","modified_gmt":"2011-06-10T12:59:03","slug":"chaos-and-harmony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/chaos-and-harmony\/","title":{"rendered":"Chaos and Harmony"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Carl Frederick<\/span>
\n\"Carl\"<\/a> For as long as I can remember, I have been involved with the martial arts.\u00a0 I connected with it, and like a musician to his instrument, I seemed to have a talent which I was able to tap into.\u00a0 I remember my master in Tang Soo Do, very early on in my training, explaining to me the power of martial arts, and in particular Tang Soo Do.\u00a0 He stated that what we are learning was meant for one thing, and one thing only: war.\u00a0 The techniques we were learning were tried and true battlefield tactics, and were meant to kill.\u00a0 But we don’t live in feudal Korea; we live in a world that prefers movie flash to real tactics.\u00a0 The fact remained, however, that what we were learning was deadly, warlike, and chaotic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Today, martial arts are a form of self-defense, meant to be used only in the most dire of situations, and not to be taken lightly.\u00a0 I am equally amazed and scared by the things that I know.\u00a0 But something that I have realized in my time in Aikido, was that my Tang Soo Do master was right.\u00a0 Everything I knew was chaotic.\u00a0 My attacks caused injury and pain, and possibly even death.\u00a0 Even my ability to block incoming attacks had a chaotic motive.\u00a0 Like an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force, there was no harmony or balance in what I did.\u00a0 It was simple: defend myself against an attacker, and never take a life unless no other option was feasible.\u00a0 Even then, I should try to find a way.<\/p>\n

This is what draws me to Aikido.\u00a0 I have a choice whether or not to cause injury, pain or death.\u00a0 In this sense, Aikido leaves you no choice, its intent is harmony and non-violence.\u00a0 There is no chaos.\u00a0 I also like it in the practical sense of my career–it would look bad for a police force to have a cop roundhouse kicking felons.\u00a0 So I like the immobilizing, passive defensiveness of the art.\u00a0 But also, it makes me realize that I don\u2019t need to cause injury to defend myself.<\/p>\n

Granted, I still like my \u201charder hitting\u201d style.\u00a0 And yes, any time there is a technique on the mat that seems more brutal, I get a gleam in my eye.\u00a0 Although I don\u2019t believe in the whole idea of \u201cbringing uke back into harmony, and making them one with the world,\u201d when a sociopath is willing to kill me so much as look at me, I still believe in the principle of non-violent solutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Carl Frederick For as long as I can remember, I have been involved with the martial arts.\u00a0 I connected with it, and like a musician to his instrument, I seemed to have a talent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4976,"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":[17,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-carl","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358","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=358"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3842,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions\/3842"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}