A few weeks ago, I wrote about some things my taekwondo instructor was teaching me about aikido, and how I took away an idea that has a broader application in life. What he was trying to teach me was that in a struggle, it is often better to focus your attention on where your center is, rather than on the points of resistance. If you focus on the points of resistance, your opponent can get you off balance and you cannot defend yourself if you are off balance.
As I said, I think this is an important life lesson as well.
I think that, too often, we focus our attention on external matters, points of resistance, issues where there is a difference between the way things are, and the way we'd like them to be. Attention is a finite resource, when our attention is focused on these points of resistance, we cannot pay attention to our center.
There were two parts to this drill. In the first part, I was to try to get my instructor off balance, to make him lift or move one of his feet in response to what I was doing as he held my wrists. While doing so, I was not to lose my balance either, I was not to lift or move one of my feet. In all of these drills, he was able to get me to lift one of my feet, and I wasn't able to get him to move one of his. In the second part of the drill, I was to simply try to keep my balance and not allow him to get me off balance. I lost my balance nearly every time in each drill. I lost my balance more quickly when I was defending, resisting his efforts to get me off balance.
As we worked through the drills, I began to realize that I had more control when I focused my attention on where my center was and I could use my knees, hips, and spine to keep my center more closely in balance than if I had my attention focused on the resistance at my wrists.
So, what I learned was that if I focused my attention on my opponent in this particular struggle, it worked to his advantage. He was able to get me off balance more quickly; in effect, I was assisting him.
I think in life the situation is such that often neither opponent is an aikidoist, so the advantage doesn't go to one group or the other consistently. Rather, the conflict looks more like two untrained combatants, each unable to maintain their balance, landing ineffective blows but unable to adequately defend themselves either. Each barely able to control themselves, with the possibility of someone becoming seriously injured, or the issue going unresolved for prolonged periods of time. This is not a good thing, I think.
When we stop paying attention to our center, we get off balance, and we behave in ways we wouldn't behave in if we were able to maintain our balance. For instance, at our center, I believe most of us believe we should all treat one another with respect. But when our attention is focused on the point of resistance, we lose touch with what we hold in our center, and so we treat people in ways that we wouldn't if we were able to be mindful of our center. Also, when our opponent is able to exploit our off-balance condition, we're not able to deflect or re-direct a clumsy attack (someone not respecting us), and so the attack carries more sting, and we respond from anger and emotion rather than clear thinking.
I think there will always be conflicts, but I think in both combat and in debate, there are ways of resolving conflict with the least amount of damage, that reflect skill and mastery.
I think that nearly everyone would benefit from an annual mental health check-up. I think nearly everyone would benefit from some form of counseling. Let's call it, "continuing education." In lieu of that, I think nearly everyone would benefit from studying a martial art, and making it a regular practice.
As it stands now, I think too many people are getting too hurt, too angry and too tired.
The usual disclaimer applies: I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. Do your own thinking.
I was reading somewhere that Volvo was in some sort of collaboration with women to design a car for women. I thought this was a neat idea, but I think it needs to be said that automotive engineers haven't really designed a car for men yet either.
Take, for instance, the problem of six packs of long-necks. What good is it if your vehicle will pull .9 lateral g's (to abuse the apostrophe for the sake of apostrophe abuse), if your tall cold ones go flying about all over the cabin at .2 lateral g's? And don't get me started about hitting the brakes. Every back seat, no, make that every seat should have the bottom cushion easily flip up to reveal a rectangular cavity the size of the ordinary six-pack of 12 ounce long-necks, approximately 3.6 inches deep, and made from an appropriately resilient material with good insulation qualities. It's important not to bruise the brew, if you know what I mean. Lift cushions, insert adult beverages, haul ass. How hard is that?
I also read somewhere that Mercedes or Porsche had to recall a bunch of their cars because their male drivers were angry with accepting directions from a navigation computer with a female voice. This is just an example of poor human interface guidelines. For instance, the engineers should have created an appropriate affordance for the male driver, as Don somebody-or-other-who-used-to-work-for-Apple would tell you.
Here's how I'd do it. You have the voice be Sigourney Weaver's and then you put the directions in the appropriate context. For example, "Take exit 9 to route 81, 2 miles ahead." What self-respecting guy is going to listen to that shit? No, here's what you do, you have Sigourney say in that intense, ever-so-sexy Ripley voice: "I say we take exit 9 to route 81 in 3.2 klicks and nuke the site from orbit." (Notice how I got the metric reference in there? Guys will do the mental math to convert to something their odometer speaks if it sounds "cool.") Yeah, we're down with that! And there could be a feature in the car where the car recognizes the gender of the person sitting in the passenger seat, and if a female occupant reaches for the stereo controls, you'd have Ripley say, "Get away from her, YOU BITCH!"
Yeah! I'd buy that car! (I'm being facetious. Well, mostly.)
Oh, yeah. And every single car made for anyone should have a sensor in it that blows the horn and flashes the lights if you've left your kid in the car, strapped into a car seat. How hard would that be to engineer? I'm sick of reading those stories.
I suppose I should patent those ideas, or something.
I couldn't look out my back window from work. I don't know, but I suspect traffic on port 5100 is blocked at the firewall. C'est la vie, I guess. Or, since we hate the French now, I guess I should say, shit happens. So much more American, you know.
I'll probably shut it down a little later on today so I can go back to playing Halo online. I'm going to think some more about what I might do with something like this.
Figure I might as well mention Apple's Airport Express. Looks cool. Probably $30.00 too much, but it'll go down eventually. It is a solution to a problem I've been struggling with. I'd like to play my iTunes through my bookshelf stereo system. It may only be modestly better than my Creature Speakers, but it'll fill the whole apartment. Right now, the "cheap" fix is to hook up the iBook to the TV and route the sound to the stereo that way. The only aux input on the receiver/amplifier is used by the TV anyway, so I'd pretty much have to go through the television anyhow. Another attractive alternative would be to burn my iTunes library to DVD and have my DVD player handle the music chores. Unfortunately, while it will play a CD with MP3 data, it doesn't recognized a DVD filled with MP3 data. And, of course, it wouldn't be an "authorized device" for my iTMS protected AAC files, either. So the iBook looks like the better fix.
The one question I have about the Aiport Express is bandwidth in a mixed b/g environment. Even with a large buffer selected in the prefs, iTunes sometimes stalls on the iMac playing the library over the air from the G4 MDD. An all g network would probably have sufficient bandwidth to avoid a stall, but I'd be streaming from my NetGear b wireless router, so I suspect I'd see a similar problem with Express: Occasionally the music stops while the buffer fills up. It doesn't happen on every song, but it happens often enough to be a distraction.
BZ to Apple for an interesting device, at an almost reasonable price. It's a sign of what else we can look forward to coming out of Cupertino, I think.
