My Pyramid Scheme
When I was about 15 years old, I realized I knew everything. Not from the perspective of “My parents don’t get me”, or “The world operates for silly and ridiculous reasons that I could fix in a heart beat if I cared” typical way, but a true metaphysical understanding of the world and its workings.
I thought myself deep, advanced and skilled in wielding mental wizardry that revealed the fundamental roots to all life and non-life. I could see yen and yang while others could only think to tattoo the symbol somewhere on their bodies hoping to gain its strength through some odd absorbing process.
I wrote a great mass of this wisdom down, often in lyrical poetic form because intelligence, *true* intelligence spoke through artistic forms that related to math such as music, meter and measurements.
Before I drag you too far along, I assure you I’m wrong. This isn’t a post about how I thought I was right but now I’m right. It’s about being wrong in a rather infinite way. Maybe more importantly to me (and I stress *me*) is what do I do with that?
One of the things I thought up in my Confuscious like days was nothing new at all. I didn’t claim it to be either, but I adopted it like I was the only one doing it for miles, even worlds around.
I decided there were three important points in my life I had to balance to stay relatively happy. They enjoy the new age terminology of Mind, Body and Spirit. Tending to these three points led towards a relative form of happiness.
Mind was a symbol for all things experiential, whether learning, teaching or using things I knew. Simple right? Body was all things physical including diet and exercise (I might add this seems to be the easiest one to ignore for me). Spirit was something that gratified a moral character. It could be helping people, really listening to music or taking in art in a way that touches your thoughts and ability to sympathize (empathize, whichever the case may be).
It kind of works. But it’s basic and it lacks a point in my estimation. I think Humility may be that point.
I’m not sure how I think it all works just yet, but I think some examples of how I’m trying to _use_ this concept have given me more insight.
In Karate, a few weeks ago I really struggled with this exercise that my fellow students were accomplishing with relative ease. The idea was simple in nature. Step forward, as your feet come to a stop, transfer that frictional energy from the feet through the hips and out to the arms (ultimately to the finger tips and into an opponent). Basic physics would validate the concepts the instructor was teaching and I couldn’t find any flaw with the idea.
That didn’t stop my body from refusing to do it. Blaming my body turns out to be wrong, it’s just a utensil. That’s where humility stepped in.
There is a pattern of events that tend to happen when people find out something is wrong. Denial is the first phase (sounding familiar?). Acceptance comes way down the line, but I am wondering that it has to be that way at all.
Before my body was going to do any of this energy stuff, I had to get away from believing that my understanding of the concept in any way related to me being able to do it.
Frankly, I fell into the pattern once again and went into the next phase… anger. The teacher’s voice, though patient and helpful became irritating to me. I knew this was wrong, but it had nothing to do with the fact I felt it strongly. Again, my knowledge of a situation didn’t have any bearing on how I was actually reacting to it.
In the “stages of dealing with death”:http://www.cancersurvivors.org/Coping/end%20term/stages.htm (which is where denial, anger and eventual acceptance come from) there is a category called bargaining. This bargaining, I think, is all internal and has no external appearance. You deal yourself reasons not to handle a situation or try to avoid it by reasoning alone. Shortly following this came some depression.
I usually leave Karate practice feeling pretty good and excited about the coming practice to learn more. This particular practice I was wondering if I should spend more time at home with the baby and Kerry.
Today, I used humility. I still started with denial and went into some anger, but I stopped myself. I believed that I didn’t really know what I was trying to learn anymore. Instead of using any knowledge I had from my past, I accepted what the instructor and my body were telling me. I relaxed more and more. I made more mental notes of what my body was feeling as I performed the move. After about an hour of doing the same damn move over and over again, my teacher finally had an excited tone in his voice.
He started yelling at me “*More MORE MORE, like 100 times more.. 200 times more.. 400 times more*”, as I felt the floor start moving my body. The lesson I learned was simple, and the move may or may not make me “Chuck Norris”:http://www.chucknorris.com/ in the next few years, but it was a good start.
Now, just as we started getting into more advanced moves, my toe pad ripped on the wax floor as well as the front pad of my foot and the nice dose of pain and the slippery feeling of the blood made it hard to move much further, but I finally started to feel the concept in my own body.
I’ve been practicing Karate with all my power in my upper body as my core. Today, I started learning how my core is going to be much much lower from here on out. Humility was the only thing that sped up that process; if not being the one thing that finally let it happen.
My teacher, during the first practice, gave me the best insight. He was talking about Karate, but I internalized it much more.
“When we are in a confrontation and there is a lot of energy coming at us, we have a tendency to push back against it. We try to use our will to counter that force. What we really need to do is learn to accept what is coming and be receivers of that energy.”
Now, I know ‘energy’ conversations have a tendency to make people feel like they are talking Asian Magic potions, but this is much more concrete and follows into well-known Christian beliefs. It seems a dubious pattern that the greatest and most peaceful leaders of our human history all found ways to passively accept the anger thrown at them and somehow make a good result out of that. Ghandi, Martin Luther King and Jesus to name a few.
Humility seems to be such a strong ingredient. I think I’ve underestimated its value for a long time. Somehow, I hope documenting my egregious error reminds me that I will do it again and not to respond with frustration so quickly, but acceptance in its stead.