photo: sundial at tower bridge
by Andrew Bulhak
Time goes, you say? Ah, no!
Alas, Time stays, we go.
Henry Austin Dobson, The Paradox of Time
I'm bidin' my time,
'Cause that's the kinda guy I'm.
Ira Gershwin, Bidin' My Time
Go on, go on, until you reach the end of the line
But I know you'll pass my way again
It's just a matter of time.
Brook Benton, It's Just A Matter Of Time
I'm sorry to break it to you but by tomorrow you won't have time to stand around.
Cillian Murphy in In Time
Time and I against any two
Cardinal Jules Mazarin
Humans have a complicated relationship with time. We make time or take time. We spend time or save time or pass time. Or waste time. And we want to travel in time. Novels and movies like The Time Machine and In Time and TV series like The Misfits explore different aspects of time. Time is ever-present in popular culture. If it is possible to say ever-present about time. So what is time exactly? Is it a line? Is it a stream? The Mayans thought it was a turning wheel.
In the martial arts there are different measures of time. My teacher Kinjo Asoh Sensei used to say that ten years was only one step in aikido. Some techniques are called twenty-year techniques - the time it takes to learn them. Recently people like K Anders Ericsson, Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel Levitin have used a benchmark of 10,000 hours of practice as an indication of excellence or mastery in anything: music or chess for example. But there are people who have trained in the martial arts for twenty or thirty or forty years who understand very little. And very, very occasionally you meet people whose understanding after a few years of practice is already mature and deep. How to train is important. Not just how often.
One clear use of time in martial arts is the structure for progression through the different ranks. It takes so many hours or days of training before you can do a test for the next grade. And there is often a minimum time period also. And there can even be age limits. So there are different but parallel time constraints.
Time can be rigid or it can be elastic. A teacher can teach following a curriculum and lesson plans. Or can have an open-ended view of time. If students keep training they will eventually learn everything.
Some courses are limited by time. Courses covering a fixed number of weeks or even just one day. So the concept of time has to be much more structured.
When it comes to a micro approach to time things get very interesting. In Japanese swordsmanship any tiny unnecessary movement - moving a toe or moving the sword blade a few millimetres in the wrong direction - could be the difference between life and death. That leads into timing. Doing something at exactly the right time.
Perhaps in the end time is just an illusion. If the journey we are on is more important than the destination how long the journey will take becomes irrelevant. But how we make the journey - that is always important..
In English we say Time flies. They say it in Japanese too. Time flies like an arrow. There is one more measure of time in Japan since the Tohoku earthquake of 11 March 2011 and the Fukushima disaster.
I talked about time travel in time takes
and about how time stopped
after the Tohoku earthquake.
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© niall matthews 2012
Niall Matthews lives with his family in Japan. He teaches aikibudo and community self-defence courses and has taught budo for twenty-five years. He was the senior deshi of Kinjo Asoh Sensei, 7 dan Aikikai. He was the exclusive uke of Sadateru Arikawa Sensei, 9 dan Aikikai, at the hombu dojo in Tokyo for thirteen years until Arikawa Sensei's death in 2003. He has trained in several other martial arts to complement his aikido training, including judo (he has 4 dan from the Kodokan in Tokyo), kenjutsu (for about ten years) and karate (for about three years). He originally went to Japan as a staff member of the EU almost thirty years ago. He received 5 dan from Arikawa Sensei in 1995. This 5 dan is the last aikido dan he will receive in his life. His dojo is called Aikibudo Kokkijuku 合気武道克輝塾. Arikawa Sensei personally gave him the character for ki in kokki. It is the same character as teru in Sadateru - not the normal spelling of kokki 克己. It means you make your life shining and clear yourself.