Martial Tuesday: One board at a time

Last week I talked about breaking and the commitment that goes into it, and the comparison between that and dealing with sin and temptation, and before I had even published the post I had more thoughts on the issue.

In my karate training it was a fairly short step from breaking a board to breaking a stack of boards, and then to doing several breaks in succession.

Breaking a stack of boards is basically the same thing as breaking a single board, except that it requires greater commitment. Instead of breaking through a barrier that is about an inch thick, you are breaking through a barrier that is 6 inches to a foot thick. Depending on how the stack is arrangedit may be exponentially harder to break or just geometrically harder to break, but the general idea is the same.

But a series of breaks is a different creature. A series of breaks is confusing because the idea is to break the whole series in rapid succession, so you have to plan the whole series out and keep them in mind. But you can't break all of the boards at the same time, and if your mind tries to, you will break none of the boards in rapid succession. You have to break it down and take it one break at a time.

Our sensei puts it like this: "It isn't five breaks. It is one break, five times."

It sounds very Zen, which is sort of on purpose. I mean, if you're going to be a karate instructor, part of the fun is getting to say Zen-ish with a fake Chinese accent. But like so many things, there is truth to it. If you let your mind think about everything you have to do in the next 10 seconds, you will not be able to commit it to the first board you break, and as I noted before that creates a destructive cycle and gives your mind yet another thing to think about while you are not-breaking the second board, and so on.

Instead, it helps to step back for a minute, and consider everything that is supposed to happen. Take in the flow of the break (in this case, 'break' referring to all of the individual breaks as a whole), and the flow of your body as you execute it. And then, let it go. To quote one of our instructors, "Mokuso, let it go." Once you know what needs to be done, forget about everything except what is in front of you now. And then explode through the break.

Once you have destroyed the first board, forget about it. It can't help you now, and you can't help it. Remember the second board and destroy it. Then forget about the second board, and repeat until there is nothing but splinters left.

To bring this post back around to what will eventually become its tired analogy, temptations won't always be weak things. Some great saint said that no one comes to understand the power of temptation who always gives in right away. That person cannot grasp the temptations that will come in time. They have not yet broken their first board, and so they cannot grasp breaking a stack of boards. As time goes by, our Sensei allows us opportunities to grow stronger by giving us bigger breaks.

And sometimes things will start to pile up. We'll find ourselves struggling with 5 different things at once, and it begins to get overwhelming. We need to stop and take a look at what is ahead of us, and then we need to forget about it and focus on one thing at a time. As Jesus said, don't worry about tomorrow. Today has enough things to worry about. He wasn't saying we shouldn't be prepared for the future to the degree that we can. But when trouble seems to be looming, prepare for it and then let it go. Sufficient to each break is the difficulty thereof.