Got Patience? One of the important message that we need to remember and always remind ourselves when we want to learn any kind of martial arts or pick up something new to learn.
This remind me of all these years when new comer came in for the Aikido Trial Class, they leave after the trial class and never come back, some train for 1-2 months then they disappear again. To what i notice these things always happen to new students due to some reasons, either they don't like Aikido, or they find it hard to learn and understand or is too boring to them.
Worst of all if the instructor does not have any patience to teach them, students might feel they are leave out. As we know some are fast learner, some are slow learner, some can do things without much explaination, some you need to spent more time in explaining to them .
Martial Art is a strange things, some movement might look easy but when we do it, the movement is actually very hard to do. The more you understand the more you find that you need to improve more in the same old things. Once a new students ask me during the 1st 10 min of the class "Sir can i learn new things today?" :) I guess he might be bored when i keep doing ikkyo with him, as is his 4th class since he join us.
Patience teaches us to understand things in the other view, and let us see things more clearly also. If students are patience enough to keep on repeating the same things we teaches, their skill will improve better cause more understanding and confident have already been build inside your mind and body without you yourself knowing it.
To you remember when we 1st started schooling, there are some subject that we find is too easy for us and we hope to learn more since is easy for us, but do we score 100 mark in these subjects? Even we do, do we really understand the subject so well that we can write a book out from our understanding? Do we make any mistake due to careless mistake in your over confident? Careless mistake in a well learn subject might only make us score less point if we understand it, yet over confident as we don't even know we understand the subject well by just reading a few time of subject might even cause us to fail it. Worst of all without patience of learning we might cause ourself injury or even death in martial art training, or any kind of self defense, street fight, etc
Training without patience lead to many things also. Some who train for years in martial art will feel they have nothing much to learn so they stop their training, as they feel they already have nothing much to learn from us, and say we keep repeating the something during training bored them, but have we forgotten what O-Sensei say? The founder during his last word say that he is only just started to learn Aikido. He even mention that by training with 10 thousand people in 1 technique, you only know that technique, how many of us reading this now can ready say that they had already training with 10 thousand people? If you have, i will say congrate to you, at least you reach a higher level in technique then many of the people out there in the world. Another question to ask, do you understand how to defend yourself among all the 10 thousand people you train with or just simply do it so that you can reach the 10 thousand people target?
Patience help us to keep our mind cool and don't rush for things wrongly also. Sometime we see things we hope to have, or hope to learn, we get so excited that we hope to have it now, yet we go for it without thinking or seeing things clearly. We might enjoy it for the 1st few year, but if things doesn't go smoothly after these few years, we might be the one suffering. Especially in martial art training, before we learn one martial art, some of us might even search a lot of information online to see more viedo clip and think we will know a things or two before we started learning, so our mind and heart is full of excitement and fire that we hope to learn, but injury might occurs when we don't know things well, we might injure other without knowing it cause the viedo clip show us so, we thought is the right way of doing things. There is no right or wrong in martial art, or any viedo clip we can search online, cause everyone training methods might be different. Sometime we make the things more easy for beginner cause we want to prevent less injury during training, later we move to more diffcult movement as they progress slowly, beginner might not understand it. As what i found out, most sensior belt injury or not due to slam or throw perform by their instructor or belt of same level, injury usually happen when training with white belt of beginner, as they are excited and tend to lose their control of strength when they leak of patient but yet full of confident :)
Patience for beginner is important, hopefully next time i can see bignner train for more then 3 months, after 3 months i hope to see them train more then 1 year, after 1 year i hope to see them more then 3 years, after 3 year to 5 years, which after 5 years i'm happy cause you already can be patience enough to find your answer of who you want to be in life, what you want to do in life.
