When you drive into the dojo in the evening, do you always take the same route? Is the route simply a tool you've learned so well that you don't even feel the need to participate in the drive? Point A to Point B, unconscious, unobserved.
Like anything we do as warriors in training; more specifically as cogs trying to reclaim our authority over ourselves; we have to study our movement. All our movement.
If you take the same drive every day to work, to pick up the kids, to get groceries, and the endless array of those requirements to move just so that the daily chores get completed, then you are not studying. In fact, you've limited your responses, you're limiting your measurement of possibilities.
I will see if I can illustrate by example.
My daughters are in High School. The parking lot of the high school has one entrance. Just one, there is no back way in and no secondary driveway in.
Where I live means that when I get to the school I have to enter the driveway from a left turn. Which means that I have to sit in the left turn lane with all the other parents. What if there was a disaster? All the other parents, who have never tried to go around the block and enter from a right turn wouldn't know how to even think that way. All the other parents wouldn't think to park in one of the side streets and walk over, park across from the football field and walk into the parking lot. This is not to imply that if push came to shove there wouldn't be people that would do the things I suggested, it means that the method of reasoning by which their minds achieve answers would be slow to make these connections. Worse, the connections would be plagued by fear, doubt, and all the other enemies of distinct action.
Now go back to what I just wrote about having to get my girls and notice, that my first gut response for word choice was: I HAVE TO
That's how deep the programming of response goes. I do not have to sit in the left turn lane, it's truly a choice, but by the measure of my own thinking, I've convinced myself that it is the natural expectation of action.
So I ask, how many different ways do you get to training? Do you know how to get there by more than two, three, four routes? Can you do these routes without looking at google, wayz, or apple? Can you go from one route to another without having to wonder if those routes interconnect?
You're training should be continuous, constant, all around you.
