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| ISBN-13: | 9781504372206 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 140 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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The Hardest Path
A Journey Outside to Answer the Questions Within
By Matt Jardine
Balboa Press
Copyright © 2017 Matt JardineAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5043-7206-0
CHAPTER 1
Sage and Wisdom Pie – A Winning Recipe
If you knew you could have anything, What would you wish for?
— Journal entry
Chinese sage Lao Tzu is quoted as teaching that "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". The hell it does! I don't mean to cast aspersions on Lao Tzu's abilities to teach, but he only had half the story. A journey of a thousand miles actually begins with the decision to start one of a thousand miles – or four or ten or however many you choose to travel.
Julio Iglesias said much the same when he sang "Begin the Beguine" in his sexy Spanish lilt to drooling crowds of infatuated women back in the 1980s. Julio wasn't quite saying the same as Lao Tzu, but nevertheless, I use his example for a couple of reasons. Every Sunday afternoon throughout my childhood, "Begin the Beguine" blared out from my parents' hi-fi system. I'm sure I heard him singing "Begin the Begin". At least that's the line that stayed with me ever since, and that's the line I suddenly find myself singing from time to time in the most random places at the most random times: at traffic lights, buying cheese, stretching, writing. And "begin the begin" perfectly describes that moment of decision-making that precedes the start of anything.
The other reason for my preference of Julio over Lao Tzu is that I detest Western social media's rape of genuine Far Eastern wisdom and meaning, with its overuse of feel-good memes, T-shirt slogans, and bumper stickers. That noise you hear is Lao turning uncomfortably in his grave. Don't get me wrong, I love Eastern wisdom: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Tibetan – you name it, I love it. I have spent my life around both the Eastern martial arts and Far Eastern healing therapies. The martial arts I teach to this day; the healing I use as my primary go-to if I'm feeling under the weather. My issue is with the pseudo-sages of the West, those who proliferate martial arts schools, yoga clubs, and alternative therapy courses up and down the country.
I was told many times, by non-Japanese martial arts teachers, that to visit a traditional Japanese dojo in Japan was a very complicated affair wrought with almost unassailable complexity. "It's because of their culture and complexities of etiquette", they told me. I remember my teacher having a far-off look as he said it that made me look behind me to see where on earth he was staring. I would need a "special introduction" from him. He was my gateway to the traditional Eastern arts. When I was "ready", he would "fix it", he told me. Wow. Thank you, Master. Years later, I was still practicing my karate in a Twickenham church hall and not in Japan. The closest I had come to training with real Japanese was when Kato joined for a week and then left. He preferred the judo club down the road in Molesey.
Eventually, despite my teacher's insistence that he would choose the time of my Japanese travels, I decided to go with or without the elusive formal introduction. Once there, I was prepared to take the risk of being beaten savagely for my impertinence, but I figured it was worth a try. I was beginning to wonder if my teacher had been stalling my journey to the East. I pondered if maybe I was a student not worthy of an invite, or if he was a teacher without credentials to secure one.
My plane touched down in Okinawa, the Japanese island where the art of karate had been created centuries before. In martial arts terms, I was home. With just my karate uniform and two belts, a black one and a white one, I found my way to the dojo of arguably the most famous karate teacher of our time, Master Morio Higaonna. More than a little nervous, and acutely aware that I was without formal introduction, I slid open the door to the main training hall. The thought played heavily on my mind, my shirt now wet with more than just the clinging damp of Okinawan humidity.
I entered with merely the manners parents teach any child when arriving at someone else's home: wipe your feet, smile, don't be a putz. Master Higaonna greeted me with the widest smile. His hands callused from years of hitting stone, wood, and people, he tapped me warmly on the back and invited me in to join the class. I offered to wear the white belt of a beginner in place of my black belt, in recognition that I was nothing in his world (I had read on the Internet that this was a good thing to do). "Why?" he asked with a puzzled look. "Aren't you proud of your black belt?"
"Yes, Shihan, very proud."
"Then put it on, Matto-san; we all just do karate here. Welcome." And that was that. The beginning of insights into what my shiatsu teacher used to call "strange English ways".
Shiatsu, as I used to explain to new patients to my London-based treatment room, is acupuncture without the needles. Most of them had heard of acupuncture at least, so I almost always used it as a reference. Japanese in origin, shiatsu is a highly effective form of alternative/ complementary bodywork therapy using pressure points, massage, stretching, and other techniques to help restore, rejuvenate, or just plain relax the recipient. Martial arts students often learn it so that they can heal the damage they may potentially deliver as karate opponents. Killing your training partners leads to lonely times in the dojo, some soon realized. The yin balancing the yang, to use traditional Eastern Asian medical parlance, seemed a logical solution.
Mr Ohashi was a little Japanese shiatsu master and teacher with a jet-black pudding-bowl haircut, a radiant smile, and the thickest jam-jar glasses you have ever seen. His accent was so obvious, it sounded more like a parody than a genuine one. If you can picture Edna "E" Mode from Disney's The Incredibles, you have Mr Ohashi – just change the accent. "Matto-san, you English are very strange," he once told me. "You love Japan. That is very good, but you are not Japanese. You should not try to be Japanese. I do not try to be English." Ohashi told me that, from his experience of teaching seminars in the UK, if he taught only in Japanese, using an English translator, he would have more students attend his lectures than if he taught in English. And his English was impeccable.
But why do these strange phenomena exist? It seems we are simply in love with the romance of the East. We like the idea of a far-off land that emerges from the mist where bald-headed masters fight, pray, and love. They are lands far enough away, with language and culture so alien to our own, that we can easily believe our imaginings without the troublesome problem of truth shattering them.
If the worst that happened with these false notions was merely deluded misrepresentation, then I wouldn't have to sit so squarely in the saddle of my proverbial high horse. But the truth is that such romantic ideas of Eastern martial arts could lead to a false sense of physical confidence regarding self-defence, while the same attitude to Eastern therapies could lead to a dangerous reliance on remedies that, on the whole, are not comprehensively proven in the treatment of life-threatening illness. It is probably best to fight cancer with radiation, not reiki.
Of course, once the romantics have bombarded us with tie-dyed yoga trousers and long, wispy grey beards and spoken to us in that sickly sweet tone of the passive-aggressive for long enough, then the realists shut down and become resistant to any of the genuine wisdom that proliferates from the East. "You had me at hello", said Dorothy to title character Jerry Maguire. "You lost me at lavender and chakra," said everyone else to the Western hippie lovers of Eastern culture.
Great wisdom and magic come from the East. Of that you can be sure. But back to Julio and the first lesson learned from the 88 temple pilgrimage, a lesson taught not in Japan but back in Surrey before even arriving. Before you can begin anything, you must first decide to do so. ("Begin the Beguine" – there is Iglesias again in my head, the Spanish earworm.) I suggest that deciding to start anything is the single most underestimated skill in the universe. Arriving at a place of firm decision involves difficult terrain, a pilgrimage in itself.
The major obstacles are uncertainty, fear, and doubt. To make a decision, first you must know what you want. Years as children typically being told to "put it down", "You can't have that today", "Money doesn't grow on trees", and "Stop daydreaming" have taken away our confidence in decision-making regarding our innate desires. We look towards others for rules, direction, and approval. Our wants are mostly their wants, if we are honest with ourselves.
It is important to remember how to dream, as we once did, before deciding which dreams we would love to turn into reality. Which of them are just vague interests, and which pique our attention? Which ones light up our instincts and scream delight at us? Our dreams are pleading to be noticed from under the weight of our suppression and repression.
Here then, is a little technique I was once taught to help us discover our innermost passions.
First, jot down the things that come to mind when you ask yourself the following questions: What would I do with my life if money were absolutely no object, barrier, or boundary? What would I do? What would I have? Who would I be?
Second (be sure not to edit your thoughts too much), note your answers to this: What would I do, be, and have in my life if I had six totally pain- and stress-free months to live?
And finally: What would I do, what would I have, and who would I be when faced with both of the above: endless money but only six months to use it?
I was told that the answers that first come to us after we delve into the questions are our deepest passions. Go after them.
But I hear you protest, despite the dreaming, I don't have all the money in the world, nor the time either. I said the very same thing when I first learnt this technique. Therein lies the problem.
CHAPTER 2Don't Be a Proper Charlie
Explaining the hachi ju hachi to a soul who has never walked, Is like trying to explain flying to a soul who has never flown.
— Journal entry
Time and money have been cited as obstacles to human endeavour for as long as humans have had endeavour – the call from within to chase our dreams dampened by reminders of economics, schedules, routines, and responsibility.
Stand amongst parents in any school playground at either picking up or dropping off time, and listen to the silent cacophony: the white noise of unvoiced complaint furrowed across brows and expressed in body language, in protest against lives lived unfulfilled. "If only there were enough time and money", whisper tired eyes, "then the life of our dreams would be ours", they suppose.
We all love our families, of course, but the longing to be more still permeates, despite our commitment to them. The guilt of striving doesn't quite manage to silence our instinct's digs that there is more to life than the endless rounds on this giant hamster wheel of daily chore.
Have you ever felt that you are a part of something bigger, grander, and more meaningful than the day-to-day grind? Words are not enough to describe it, this bigness. Do they even exist for something we can neither see nor touch but instinctively know must be there?
I remember my first shoulder rub with this nameless thing. I was around ten years old, I think. The problem with my memory is that it likes to pigeonhole everything but the immediate into a nostalgic time when I was ten, growing up in our family home. This nameless rub could have been any time, but I think I was ten. The three klonks on the dining room ceiling from my mum's broom handle muffled through the bath water where I lay submerged, eyes closed and toasty warm. It didn't startle me, I was far too sleepy for that, but it did let me know that I needed to get out now and come down for dinner.
I stood drip-drying, draped in two towels, in front of the antique mirror that Nan used to own which now filled the whole of the bathroom wall in our house. Mum always told me off for using more towels than I needed ("You don't need two, you little thing") and for leaving them on the bathroom floor for her to pick up. I still do both, except she doesn't pick them up anymore. Nor does my wife. I do. Eventually.
The mirror was completely steamed up with only my outline visible behind it. Usually I would draw pictures in the condensation. Mum used to tell me off for that as well ("Keep your mucky paws off of my mirrors and windows, Matthew Jardine"). I still do it when I go down to visit them in Cornwall. It is childish behaviour, and she still uses my full name when telling me off.
It was then, as I stood drying and chewing the edge of my towel, when I got both a feeling and an image of a flame glowing right at my centre. I don't know where I mean by "my centre". It just seemed to be somewhere right in my middle. I couldn't see it for real; the image was just a certainty in my mind's eye. I could see it no more clearly by looking more closely than you can see a sparrow hawk that crosses your periphery on a country walk. It didn't seem strange, or frightening or particularly poignant. It just felt right, and I was certain about it. As time went on, I began to sense that the same flame that glowed at my middle burned brightly at the centre of all other things too. The connection between both made me feel part of both: me and all other things, alive and together.
In contrast, death and abandonment scared the wits out of me as a child. The thought of it would make me tear around the house trying to escape the grim thoughts threatening to terrorise me by arising inside my head. My parents would often have to intercept my sprints and hold me close in their arms until the terror subsided and I passed out, asleep, in their clutch. Sometimes, perversely, I would make myself think about death, to a point just short of hysteria. I could keep myself just on the right side of terror mostly, sometimes not. I would have to sprint around the house again at those times.
Rare is the person who has never wondered at, or had an experience of, the thing that sits at the very heart and start of life. Religion has made its life work to name and proselytise it; science to prove or disprove it; philosophy to boggle minds about it. Yet we all must consider it, at one time or another, if only because the reality of death forces us to search eventually for a meaning to life and to wonder at what, if anything, transcends it. Time, money, life after death, the meaning of life – these and many others are the questions that pilgrims also ponder.
"Where did you say you were going?" asked my playground parent buddy, Charlie, as he waved his Alfie into class.
"Shikoku-Japan," I answered doing the same to my son.
"Why?"
"To walk the hachi ju hachi, Japan's super pilgrimage," I told him.
"Oh." I could see and hear his brain cogs whirring, trying to process and formulate an opinion about it. "Why?" Words found, Charlie started again.
"Oh I don't know, Charlie; challenge myself, think about life a bit, because I just want to," I said.
Charlie apparently did not approve. A life living by the books had helped him master a wordless and disapproving body language. He didn't like anything even slightly off kilter. My dad is a Londoner from the East End, and I grew up around Cockney rhyming slang; Charlie was indeed a right proper one.
A disapproving guilt-laden stance has the power to drive us back into the shadows if we let it. It was a standard tactic for our parents' and grandparents' generation, post–Second World War, in a time not yet accustomed to the new opportunity. I remember my nan using it on me all the time. She did love a piece of good old-fashioned guilt.
"So who is going to look after your two then, while you are gallivanting around Japan?" he poked, referring to the care of my two young children.
"They've got a mother, Charlie," I poked back. "I think they can all survive for a month without me."
Charlie changed tack; he'd get to me somehow. "You know, as a self-employed business owner, you won't earn while you're away. Can you afford the trip and the time away? Can your family afford it?"
"No, Charlie, not really."
"And all this 'thinking about life' nonsense, what's that all about?" I saw him smirk a little; he was on a roll.
"Charlie, don't you ever wonder if there's more to life? More than all this?"
"Nothing is more important to me than my Alfie," he concluded.
Apparently, that was that. No more to be said. Charlie had spoken.
Charlie was not the first resistance I had faced with my decision to walk the 88. And he certainly wouldn't be the last. That's the funny thing with people. Many don't like to see you trying to better yourself, enjoy yourself or push on. That's the reason many of us abort our dreams, desires, and grand plans. But this resistance didn't matter actually, because even before walking a single step of the pilgrimage, I had already learnt its most valuable lesson: that a whole-hearted decision, founded on passion, had started a ball rolling that would now be impossible to stop.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Hardest Path by Matt Jardine. Copyright © 2017 Matt Jardine. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword, ix,Introduction, xiii,
Chapter 1 Sage and Wisdom Pie – A Winning Recipe, 1,
Chapter 2 Don't Be a Proper Charlie, 6,
Chapter 3 Angels at Check-In, 11,
Chapter 4 The Darkest Night of the Soul, 15,
Chapter 5 Meeting Thy Maker, 22,
Chapter 6 Mr Beginnings, 26,
Chapter 7 The Miracle of Mindfulness, 38,
Chapter 8 "Universe Requesting", 47,
Chapter 9 Letting Go, 54,
Chapter 10, 64,
Chapter 10 (Part 2) Expect the Unexpected, 65,
Chapter 11 The Power of Love, 72,
Chapter 12 You Knew It All Along, 83,
Afterword, 99,
Glossary of Terms, 103,
Suggested Reading, 111,
Acknowledgements, 113,
You May Also Like These, 115,
Contact Us, 117,
A Note about the Author, 119,