Good attention - Andrew Miller
In all westerns, and martial arts films, there comes a moment where the white hat
and the black hat meet. They stare at each other, they draw, one goes down in the dust.
It is a ritual both of the cinema and of combat : confrontation, stand-off, action.
The drama is in the stand-off, (the gun play merely relieves the tension).
The camera zeros-in on the eyes, and, if we have been asleep up until this point in the
film, we know from the character of their "look" (if not from the colour of their hats)
who will live and who will die.
It is said, and I quite believe it, that duels in old Japan were occasionally settled in this
silent exchange. examine some of the old photos of O Sensei, or of his first teacher Takeda.
Would not discretion (and the next bus out of town) be the better part of valour when confronted
with such a gaze ?
One word for this gaze is "Zanshin" -unbroken spirit, unbroken awareness -and we are often
reminded of the importance of maintaining zanshin after the execution of a technique (and too many
of us still wander away from our techniques, gazing about like supermarket shoppers who have
forgotten what they came for).
But Zanshin is not something to be tacked onto the end of a technique. It has no beginning or end; it is -or should be our basic state of mind in the dojo and outside -why not ? zanshin is not about looking over your shoulder the whole time.
Zanshin is expressed in posture, but its true focus is in the eyes : what is the character of this
"look" ? It is intense, yet it is not staring. it is a window through which we see into our
adversary. It is unselfconscious -great warriors have worked on themselves so hard they need
never think about themselves. It is a broad gaze, not focused on the other's sword or hands
or eyes. It is not aggressive or clouded by the desire to hurt, to win. If not precisely loving,
it is compassionate, and at its highest level, in the most unsentimental way imaginable, it
is virtuous. (You will see that in O Sensei's eyes, not in Takeda's. The pupil was greater
than the teacher).
Finally, where does such a look come from ? I believe, as with all our aikido, it must come
from our centre. Look from the centre, just as, when we use the bokken, we cur from our centre
to the uke's centre. Such a look should be cultivated, trained for in the same way we train in
any other aspect of aikido except that zanshin is not an aspect, it is the heart. An aikido
devoid of such spirit, such attentiveness, is utterly empty.