So here’s the thing: I was going to have a little Friday martial arts philosophy – you know, going the whole mind, soul and body route.  Turns out, I feel like a mega-copycat, because Brett does roughly the same things on Fridays.  Now I feel like a dufus >.<  I still want to do something relating to the martial arts, so I’m going to retool this for Sundays.

Sunday Meditations: “That is why you fail”

After including Yoda quotes in my last post, I started thinking about the martial arts undertones to many of Yoda’s speeches.  A friend of mine really likes a certain quote and I believe that it applies both to training and our daily lives:

Luke: I don’t believe it

Yoda: That is why you fail

After throwing a half-hearted go at raising his X-wing out of a Dagobah sinkhole, Skywalker gave up and pouted against a tree stump.  “You ask the impossible,” he whined.  Yoda, watching from a distance, shook his head: when would Skywalker finally humble himself to Yoda’s wisdom?  Yoda visualized the X-wing floating out of the swamp, felt the Force running through him and pulled the X-wing to solid ground.  Luke stood and stared: “I don’t believe it.”  Yoda reproached him: “That is why you fail.”

Skywalker’s main problem was that he was acting in what he believed was a realitic manner.  It’s similar to how I want 1 million dollars, a Macbook Pro, and a car that runs – They would be nice to have, but I’m not putting all my eggs in that basket.  I really can’t count on magically receiving millions of dollars.  Realistically, I’m going to be living in a small ranch-style house, typing on a homebrew Frankenstein computer and…still driving my 1987 Mercedes.  When I realize that having 1 million dollars is impossible, I can move on with my life and achieve something more “realistic”.

I’m sure that Skywalker thought that getting his X-Wing back would be pretty groovy, too.  But again, by not having his eggs in such a fragile basket, he was able to try to think of a more “realistic” solution.

Application

Think of your very first dream – you know, the one where you were going to be an astronaut, a dancer or even a Jedi (c’mon – admit it!).  What response did you get from the older, more experienced people?  Probably something along the lines of “get real”.

And for the martial artists: what’s your craziest dream?  Do you want to own at a competition, perhaps compete in the Olympics?

Please don’t sabotage yourselves by being “realistic”.  You may feel that going to the Olympics is unrealistic, but remember: Skywalker believed that levitating an X-wing out of a swamp was impossible and Yoda pulled the ship out with ease.  Yoda even chastised Luke for trying to be realistic and at one point needed to tell him to “unlearn what [he has] learned”.

Meditations

Your meditation for this week is to do as Yoda recommends and unlearn what you have learned about being realistic with your goals.  Stop making judgments as to a task’s realism value and start working toward a crazy dream.