anyhow, what time is it in tokyo?

or the colour of dissonance

yesterday something strange hit me in the morning and i found myself wearing two mismatching jumpers and a pair of old blue jeans discarded by my son many moons ago. i just could not not wear those two jumpers. one is mustard colour and it has light and dark blue plaid and the other is khaki green. the khaki green and the mustard just dissonated in all tones. this is how i arrived at the dojo for morning aikido practice. morning practice yesterday was a catastrophe. so much so, that the fact that we were almost all slightly off, is not even a consolation. shomein uchi nikyo? you must have been kidding! i could have given you kote gashi or shio nage, but nikyo was temporarily not available (it reminded me of what happens when a server goes down and a service is not available). i do not know if my particular bent for such jumper colours had any influence in my body's ability and aptitude in aikido techniques, but what is certain was that i was fully absent at one point and caught myself thinking of the analogy of learning aikido with the subject of a new project that i just started last week and that will be absorbing me until the end of the year. i was thinking of potentially paid work while on the tatami. i was thinking of the work, and i was thinking of money. i was thinking? oops! yes that project involves looking at some data from japan, but really... it is far far removed from anything martial or anything fictional.

then this morning under the shower i found myself having some strange ideas. i recalled a conversation that repeated itself twice this weekend, the matter of what language is my mother tongue. i do not take well to inquiries into my mother tongue. it ends up being a rather long story and most people end up much too fascinated by it, and that to me is uncomfortable. i like comfort, and english is my primary language, and no, i was not born in an english speaking country, and the rest is history. so when on saturday and then again on sunday somebody started the conversation, i warned them that they did not want to get into it, it would get complicated. well, it was not my concern for their ability to follow a somewhat errant life that preoccupied me, it is just that i remain intensely private, and i really do not necessarily care, or am uncomfortable with revealing all the facts of why my language history developed the way it did.

so this morning i am holding one of this long shower-monologues and saying to myself that it is not easy to be myself. then i caught it! being myself is the easiest thing in the world, it takes absolutely no effort what so ever. no effort! yes, being me, takes no effort what so ever. then i got back to thinking of the catastrophic training yesterday that had me on the verge of tears at one point. when this one aikidoka complained about my ukemi - still nikyo - and i was more than mildly irritated by my own contention that it was this tori's technique that sucked, not my ukemi, then i felt that there was something that i was not getting. it really can not matter how good or bad his or her technique are, if i am attacking and taking ukemi properly, that is, without falling apart at the seams or separating like mayonnaise, then if he or she is complaining, what does that mean? in a morning when training was going so catastrophically, it is amazing to discover how much was happening that was precious and brilliant. by the next round it was i who was tori and sensei uke, and i got to feel how my own technique was full of holes and got hit several times in a way that that our sensei is rather good at: mercilessly and ruthlessly with all the love in the world. come to think of it, such catastrophic and dissonant days are precious indeed, there is much to learn, if one is thirsty for the lessons.

but what time is it in tokyo, really?

i had a fantastic weekend in france! i was in the city where some of my dreams began when i was barely fourteen...