And I feel sometimes like I am laying on a river bank, and images are floating by me. Some of them wave and say hello as they drift by.
One such image was the water pools the Mayans I think it was built in front of their main pyramids. It has been speculated they were used to detect seismic activity. Water is a very sensitive surface, and it shows any changes in its environment easily.
I am like that. It is a good metaphor. I have perhaps commented on this, but if someone snaps a picture of a group of people in the room, more often than not I’m the one person who felt and saw and is looking at the camera. I don’t like having my picture taken. I don’t know why. My youngest takes great pleasure when we go out to eat snapping my picture with my hand over my face.
And the other comment I wanted to make is that we all have to deal in some way with the unpredictability of life. We never know what the currents may bring in, or take from us.
The Stoic approach is, more or less, to feel as little as possible. So, in any event, was the traditional teaching by people like Marcus Aurelius. It is a soldiers philosophy, one of embracing difficulty with no whining, no self pity, and with a masculine energy and zeal. It is not emotionless, but not flowery either. It is spartan and simple. The Japanese, in general, are, I think, good Stoics, although they get to it by a different path.
But I think with more skill, you can extend yourself, and the range of your deep affective pleasures, much farther. It is not just a question of accepting the necessary, but interacting with it, transforming it, and transforming yourself with it. It is a dance, a play. Stoics are never off balance. What I want to be is someone who is always off balance, but able to roll with it, to float with the currents, and keep my bearings anyway.
I did martial arts for many years, the Bujinkan and Jinenkan. And the classical styles are very, very clever, and very subtle. I spent many hours just slightly stepping off line from a kick or a punch, or a thrust with a knife or sword. If a miss is as good as a mile, an inch is more than you need.
But this is not disengagement. You come as close to getting hit as possible, without actually getting hit, because it means you are also close to your opponent, and the kata of course taught you how to take advantage of that in a variety of situations.
There were and remain for me countless useful metaphors, and feelings, I derived from that training. At some point, I got tired of learning ways to kill and disable people. If you really think about what you are doing, it is tiring and sad. The only thing sadder than having to kill someone is being killed yourself, and allowing or watching harm come to someone you care about. But in the real world, in my view, being armed and alert is practically more germane than learning hand to hand, sword to sword and knife to knife combat.
Be all that as it may, this feeling of being engaged without taking the full force of an emotional blow is extremely relevant to this process of learning to live skillfully.
That is what I wanted to say.