Contrary to the purpose of Memorial Day, that weekend sees more fatal automobile accidents than any other in the year. Perhaps people are excited about the first holiday weekend of summer, and become a bit careless.
About a month ago, I injured my ankle landing on uneven ground, and last weekend I cut my palm drawing a non-marked cane sword. That caught my attention. I have been very careful with those kind of injuries, and it has been a long time since I've been hurt like this. Maybe both were caused by one, brief moment of slack attention.
According to a study of failure by *Dr. Yotaro Hatamura, there are at least 30 minor failures before a major one occurs. This means that it is possible to prevent disastrous failures by paying close attention to minor failures, and studying how they occurred. Dr. Hatamura studied major car crashes, plane crashes, and many other major accidents, and he concluded with warning that there is always a history of ignoring failure. Everyone wants a success story, and tends to put a lid on their failures.
For me, my injuries are warnings, and I'm very grateful that they have turned out to be minor problems. When unwanted things happen, there are basically two ways to deal with it. One is to deny them or complain. Some people like to see life as a series of disasters, and are very depressed about it or begin to welcome disasters. The other way is to see the reality and learn from it, and be grateful about what we can learn.
How do we learn? When we look at our mind and body, I like to see some discipline of mind. Some reasonable strictness of mind, thoughts about what should be and should not be, is a good thing. However, our body has a tendency to learn things much more easily when it is enjoying them. When we want to learn something, then, it is good to have a mind which is much more disciplined, and find a way that the body can enjoy it, rather than feel it as torture. There is no such thing as an easy out, so called “No pain, no gain”. But chronic pain just occupies us, and if we don't correct what is causing it, we can't learn much beyond how to live with our pain.
Even though certain failures may be good learning opportunities, if you struggle with the same thing too much and for too long, you won't have anything left to help anybody else. At some point you need to change what you're doing, and stop feeding the struggle. Well, if I want to concern myself only about my own well-being, I might choose to become a monk for the sake of my mind, or a medical doctor for the sake of my body. But both are too much struggle for me ;-). Maybe this is one reason I became an Aikido instructor; it helps me see the mechanism of a problem and correct it, so that I don't have to struggle too long.
*Yotaro Hatamura
Chairperson, Association for the Study of Failure
Professor, Kogakuin University
Professor Emeritus, The University of Tokyo
Link:http://www.shippai.org/eshippai/html/index.php?name=news317
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