"To practice the Way singleheartedly is, in itself, enlightenment. There is no gap between practice and enlightenment ..."
-- Dogen Zenji
Rodrigo made a really great point at the end of training Tuesday night. He talked about competition team training as training both for those who are going to compete as well as those who "want to train as if they were going to compete."
I think that really gets at the point. Truth told, I'm pretty ambivalent about competing. Unlike a lot of folks, I really don't have much of a natural impulse to prove or test myself against others. But that said there's nothing more fun than "training" for competition. Everything is tighter, a little more serious and purposeful, with everyone obviously working hard and committed to the same tripartite goal: a win for the Academy, wins for your teammates and wins for yourself.
It's really a special time: the best time to be training, the best time to watch and see what a jiu jitsu school is really made of. Maybe they will win, maybe they won't. But who would dare deny any school a shot if you stopped by some afternoon or evening during competition training and saw how hard everyone is preparing - from the white belt with just a month of training before his first tournament to the veteran black belt who is both teacher and competitor?
Both Prof. Rodrigo and Carlos, in their different ways, have been working to tighten things up as GB Seattle 3.0 rolls into the new year. I'm grateful for it. For me, one of the great things about the academy is that it is not like the rest of the world, in which personality so often trumps purpose. Jiu jitsu is, among many things, a sort of moving meditation - maybe the ultimate one - and being able to enter that space with its rules and its disciplines and its apparently endless rewards is, as Huxley might put it, a truly gratuitous grace: not necessary for life, but oh so helpful for living.
