Around here Spring may be tentative, unsure. It can also engage in behavior that is taunting, equivocal, even mean spirited. At times like that it's hard not to take its prevarication personally. Here Spring is a liar. Any given day may be sunny and warm only to blast sudden winds or even to dowse seaside hopes with biting cold rain. Friday you said it's April, California, perfect. Saturday you are on your knees re-igniting the pilot light long before the next September when this ritual would make sense.
Despite these fakes and feints you feel the need to train. It comes on you as a buzz of sudden energy, like the euphoria of a mixed drink kicking in. You are walking down the hall and you throw out your hand, a casual flick of the wrist, a satisfying snap of the tendons and, yes, it's time to move.
Of course you never completely stopped training, but it was a cruel winter and the new spring air makes you feel as though you had been sloughing off. Outside the sun is creeping across the yard and it seems like an over-eager training partner, gloved and padded, standing on your porch squinting through the kitchen window, banging his mitts together anxious to start.
But it's still early in the day and a little cold outside despite the morning sun so you make tea. That will help the heat along. The heat for the inside.
The hard thing, when you've done this for so many seasons, is to not let the noise from the past get into your bones. It can be like trying to sleep when the party music and the moronic conversations next door are just low enough that you can't complain to the neighbors but just strong enough that you can't ignore them either. That's how all your past training can sit there in the middle of road, fouling things up. No, you'll stretch a little to begin like a sane person. Even if you could recapture your youthful splits what would you do with them? This spring has to be a spring unlike springs of the past, a spring of austere determination.
You put the tea cup down after you sip and you start warming up even though you don't feel like it. You want to go straight to practice. Warming up is safe though, a good way to start practice and to start off a season. Cleaning the pipes out, that's what you tell yourself as you glance up at a sound and see a squirrel darting across some branches as lively as a playful fish. You feel the warming sunlight on your cheek, you can see a wisp of steam blurring the edge of the tea cup, you can feel the heat starting in your belly and your joints.
You will stand a while. That's maybe the most frustrating way to start practice ever devised but its' safe and, perversely from the distilled experience of years, you know that if you stand in the beginning everything that follows will seem easier. It's like eating the spinach off your plate first...
So you stand and breathe, for a while. Being smart, being seasoned, you halt the standing before your brain fixates on a list of your flaws parading slowly before you mind's eye. Anyway the heat is in you now. You begin to move.
When you were younger you had a whole itinerary. There were kicks to be snapped, weapons to be whistled, forms to be detailed, basics to be endured. By now you've been on the whole tour, up island and back. Few enterprises surprise any more and all tasks have finally become choices.
This is the real reward you've captured over the years, as real as a fistful of cash. Everything is practice if you say it's practice. Everything and anything. Nowadays all you have to do is show up and let things tip over and run down slope all by themselves. Practice is defined by whatever you practice, that's it.
So you just start moving. That's all there is. But you move in a determined way. You can hear the rustle of fabric, feel the stretch of your skin, sense the hidden jolts as your tendons awaken and your muscles begin to reach out and test themselves. Your arms begin to coil, blind snakes following blind instinct. The practice just has to be spurred, it will take you after that. It goes where it wants to but you get to ride along. You've been doing it long enough to trust that now. At times it can be like sitting at a screen waiting for some unknown web site to materialize; boredom and expectation alloyed. At other times you are trying to catch something or something is trying to catch you or you are catching up. It's impossible to tell but it's fast, thought is unnecessary in that space. Either way, fast or excruciatingly slow, the practice bears you where it and you want to go.
No matter how free it feels there is always a gamble because there's a disassociation in the martial arts. What does this feel like? What does it look like? Is this correct form? Is this the most power I can get? Just as a dancer sees herself as an instrument, even while her living body moves, your mind splits into two screens. When it's best it's like the pen taking over and sliding across the page. The poetry just wriggles out of the tip. When it's bad it's not just watching paint dry but being drying paint: dead, flat and wrong, all at once. At least they didn't make Sisyphus build his own boulder from cement and sweat. But in this art you clear your own battleground, fight the battle then have to lie down on the same spot.
But then it's over and you can hear the squirrel rustling the branches but you are done. To go on would be to start another session, to start playing another tune. But something has changed and you got it. Some of the Spring is in you now. The tea is cool by now but you drink it anyway.
Maybe you will warm it up.
TM
Ted Mancuso is the head of Plum Publications and this web site. He runs a school in Santa Cruz, California. He is currently working on a book on the Bandit Knife.