The Next Day, Delayed.

The leg is there. No denying it; the leg is there. However, everything is a little more motile than I'd expected. What pain persists serves, mostly, as a reminder to keep stretching, both before and after practice, and just about any other free moment of the day, in the hopes that I might one day walk, once again, in a manner unlike that of a pirate.

This just-enough-nagging brand of hurt had me looking around the mat last night. Mostly, I know my fellow students' longer-lasting ailments. I know who has the truly bad knee. The guy who needs the hip replacement but refuses the surgery. The woman whose wrists always, always hurt. Last night's was an interesting study. We all watch the same sensei, then we do innumerable, personal variations on that central standard. A little more apparent than usual last night was the fact that our personal derivations from the source often take one of three forms: response to pain; aversion to pain; and laziness. There's a second, huge category, of simply not getting it, with its own sub-categories, but that's a different post under a different topic on some future day. I was reminded last night in a very visceral way that, just as we aim to avoid hurting our uke in the process of blending--for the sake of his reflexive cooperation, and circularity, and morality, etc., etc., etc...--the path we take and the form we use to accomplish that blending has quite a lot to do with avoiding hurting ourselves.

This is something I hadn't thought of in a while. How much horse stance hurts; and just plain-old hanmi. Especially when you're just starting out, or nursing an injury, and probably in the practice of later years, just standing still can be incredibly, unendurably strenuous. Maintaing that posture, while dealing with someone flinging hands and feet and headbutts at you? Well: there's your difficulty right there. Aikido's hard becuase standing upright is hard. Our evolutionary ancestors knew all about this pain; Aikido reminds us of it.