Riding in the car, I had to remove my sunglasses and looked for a good place to set them. On the dashboard, they could slide around and get scratched, just as they could if I put them in the glovebox or even in my bag. I began to think about how concerned I was about the sunglasses in relation to their value. They weren't very expensive and I'd had them for over a year.

I started to think about how often we are concerned about things of little value. We often spend more emotional energy on things than they are really worth. If we spend our money on "stuff" that has little or no real value or importance, it is easy to fall into this trap of becoming overly concerned about things instead of spending our emotional energy on things that are really much more important.

A few years ago I had a talk about value with a student at my dojo who was expressing some dissatisfaction with it. He wanted to put in minimum effort, pay minimum fees, and was still always the first in line when there was something to collect for free. He was expressing an “entitlement mentality”, thinking that he deserved something without putting anything into it. I was paying almost 1,000 times as much as he was in monthly training fees at the time because I was training more and going to more expensive classes. He lived half an hour away from the dojo, and didn’t seem to appreciate that people were coming from all over the world to study these martial arts, and making some big sacrifices to do so. After our talk about the value of the training, he decided it was worth it to stick with it, and is still a member of the dojo today.

What do you value?
Are those things worth enough to you to make the necessary sacrifices for? If not, then perhaps you do not value them as highly as you may think. We so often spend a dis-proportionate about of time and energy on things that we don’t really value compared to those that we say we do.

In business as well, often people forget about value and turn their business into simply an attempt to get as much money as possible for as little as possible. Employees, too, often have the attitude that they will only put in the minimum required effort to get paid - another example of the “entitlement mentality”. This attitude often means that they are not doing what they enjoy doing, and in effect have become slaves of their employer. They are simply working for money and not for any sense of personal pride or satisfaction.

A healthy business attitude is one where the business takes pride in producing a high-quality product or service for its customers, with the understanding that it will be fairly compensated for the value that it produces. The best employees work out of a sense of enjoyment and fulfillment in their job, and of course the paycheque then comes in as a natural result. Such employees are not only the most beneficial to the company, but they are the most personally satisfied themselves as well.

Question for the day:
Do you work out of a sense of pride in the value of the service that you are providing?

One of the things that I’ve been noticing in martial arts classes the last number of years is an increase of what I call “lap dog syndrome.” This is where a (ever-larger, it seems) number of people will hang around at the front of the class where Sensei watches people train between teaching techniques. When Sensei has stopped the class to teach, what you see behind him is a line of people standing there with their arms folded like a line of Stormtroopers. There is so much posing and posturing, people laughing at Sensei’s jokes before they are translated when their knowledge of Japanese is nowhere near close enough to understand what he just said. People “guarding the front of the line” when Sensei is doing calligraphy for people in the class. The new Vanguard. They don’t seem to realize that there never used to be one, so we can probably do without one now as well. But to be a conduit to Sensei is a position of power.

There was a time (when I visited in 1995 and moved over in January 1997) when there were 4 foreigners who were the seniors, and people respected them for the time they have lived in Japan, their Japanese ability, their skill, and their relationship with Sensei. These gems of the Bujinkan have been eclipsed by social climbers, those who want to be in the forefront, those who want to be on film, those who want to be seen as seniors, those who desire the admiration and respect of others.

There was a time when the translation was automatically deferred to the person in the room with the best Japanese language ability, by default and out of respect. Now we have translators jumping over each other, interrupting each other, cutting each other off. Everyone wants to appear as if they know something. Someone will butt in and translate something just because he happens to know a few of the words in the sentence that Sensei just said, even though he is lost at the next sentence. At the last class I was at, there were 4 people trying to jump in and translate, while the person with by far the best Japanese, who has translated at many overseas Taikai as well as rendered many of Sensei’s books into English, sat at the back of the class completely unacknowledged. His Japanese is 50 times better than anyone who was translating - and all of the translators knew it. Or should have.

People ask me why I don’t translate anymore, and this is the reason. I have no desire to compete with someone who wants to translate so badly that they won’t defer to someone else in the room who is more skilled at Japanese - and I don’t mean to me, I mean to the person in the room who is more skilled at Japanese. In my own case, I also got tired of being interrupted one moment and then asked for translation help by the same person the next moment when they got stuck. I’m not a Bujinkan social climber, I’m not a Bujinkan lap dog. I don’t care about placing myself between Sensei and everyone else as a conduit. I’m just a guy who likes Bujinkan martial arts and enjoys training.

I encounter a lot of people who seem to have little else in their life than the Bujinkan and their status or rank in it. The Bujinkan is their life, and they derive their whole sense of identity from it. Their business cards are Bujinkan, their blogs are solely for the purpose of disseminating “the Word” of the Bujinkan from on high, their Facebook profile photos and photo albums are nothing but Bujinkan and ninja paraphernalia. This type of thing has increased exponentially in recent years. The “seniors” who were keeping everything in check for years are gone - moved away from Japan or training more quietly - and the new generation is completely different. The older generation used to put the younger “pups” in place when they got out of line or talked about things they knew nothing about. Now its the “I’m ok, you’re ok” be-politically-correct game, while everyone not-so-secretly jockeys for position at the front of the line.

Well, this isn’t a very positive post. But a number of people have been asking me my thoughts on these issues for some time now. Its not a very politically-correct way of addressing the questions. I still have a lot to learn from Sensei. He laughs and is patient no matter what happens, and no matter who he is dealing with, no matter what the size of the ego is. He carries it off without a hitch. I’d really like to be able to do that someday. But if I were him at his age and had been putting up with as much as he has for as long as he has - I’d probably have already retired. So few people seem to realize the patience and forbearance that he needs to have just to put up with us all.

Sensei keeps a good perspective on the Bujinkan. He told me in 1995, “I don’t need the Bujinkan. I could fold it up tomorrow and it wouldn’t mean anything to me.” Bujinkan ranks are also not in the 9 schools that Hatsumi Sensei is Soke of, but ranks in the “Bujinkan”, a 30-year-old martial arts organization. People should keep this in perspective and not think of themselves more highly than they ought simply because they have a high rank in the Bujinkan. Just because Sensei is a genius at martial arts doesn’t mean that we are as well simply because we go to his classes and have a high dan grade and stand around and laugh at his jokes. It is important to laugh - its good for one’s health and good for mental equilibrium. But it helps if you get the joke and aren’t just laughing to make everyone else think that you got it.

It won’t be long before the Bujinkan is a a crossroads. The glue that holds it all together - Sensei - will move on to do his own thing. He lives life as a martial artist and as a human being - not as a slave to his own organization. We should follow that example and strive to become more well-rounded human beings as well, not simply highly visible and highly ranked Bujinkan members. When Sensei moves on, it will be interesting to see what happens. In preparation for that time, what I think we need in the Bujinkan today is more sincerity, more humility, and more people who can see themselves openly and honestly and who sincerely work on polishing themselves - not because of the Bujinkan, and not because of Sensei, but simply for the love of the arts.

Last week Sensei spoke again of the importance of connection, using the examples of the joints in the body. The body has many joints which both connect all the parts together and allow it to move smoothly. The fewer joints, or connections, we have, the less smooth our movement will be. Demonstrating a technique, he said that he could do it this way because he was using all of the joints in his spine together, as if it were a rope.

The rope is an important tool in this years’ training theme as it demonstrates the connectedness of things. Sensei also mentioned that the rope is like one big joint working as a whole - it has no links or joints in it, such as a chain does for example, so it can be used in a supple and fluid manner. Perhaps another way of looking at it is viewing the rope as being composed of a billion tiny joints which have been amalgamated into one thing which works as a single unit. All of the separate parts have been united to create a new thing - and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, as they say.

The word for joint in Japanese is ‘kansetsu’ (関節), and it is also interesting that the word for ‘indirectness’ is also pronounced ‘kansetsu’ (官設). I certainly felt both aspects of this when he allowed me to feel the technique. He was controlling me so lightly that it felt like I was being held in place by a single sheet of paper. It was the indirect manner in which he responded to my punch that allowed him to do it.

Back after a long hiatus!

I got a Mac (again) in January, and since iLife comes with iWeb its pretty hard *not* to come up with a website of some sort. Unless you constantly flit from project to project like the guy in the photo.

It’s late so this won’t be a long one, but just thought I’d let you know I’m back! More to come - hopefully! (I always say that and then get busy and before I know it 6 months have passed before I’ve made an entry. Hopefully that won’t happen this time - hopefully. )

Just thought I’d get this one out while the Sun is still in 11 degrees Gemini. ‘Cause the Gemini symbol looks like an eleven. Yes, that could be relevant - if you wanted it to be.