Getting better
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I was having real trouble writing a blog post tonight. I had some ideas but the post itself didn’t want to be written. Eventually I had the good sense to get up and flail my arms and legs around wildly. But it wasn’t all wild flailing, at least at first, and that’s what I want to talk about in this post.
The non-wild-flailing bit
When I started my Shiva Nata session tonight, I was being very careful. I was just learning a new leg pattern and I was trying to get it right. But! (I recalled) Dance of Shiva is about getting it wrong! So I doubled my speed and went full tilt at it.
This is where things get interesting
It was pretty messy. But it was a lot more fun. And I thought,
“Sometimes you just have to dive in and do things at full steam without checking if you’re doing it right. No second guessing yourself.”
I should know this. I’ve been doing Aikido for five years now, and the magic always happens not when you’re analysing your technique, but when you’re going at it intensely and just watching, silently, what you do and what happens when you do it.
This might tell us something about how we learn best
Not by critically watching ourselves, but by jumping in there and doing it. If you blog, just write something. You can analyse it and decide what to tweak later. If you’re starting a business, just create your website and start talking to people. Dive in without a care for how much you’ll mess up. You will. You know you will. But that’s not the point.
The point is that when you act like this, you act naturally. When you stuff it up, it’s because you’ve found something to improve in your natural behaviour, not because you should have spent an extra hour second-guessing your course of action. But when you’ve done this for a while, where will that lead?
You’ll do your thing naturally, at full steam, and you won’t miss a beat. You’ll be fully engaged with it, giving it your all, and creating amazing things in the process.
Won’t that be something?
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28 June 2009 at 12:25
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