BODY MEMORY/THE LURE OF THE FAMILIAR

Back when I stopped training for two years for my ACL surgery and rehab, I had "waking dreams" in which I'd find my wandering mind and on a small scale my body doing aikido techniques. It was always either sayunage (also known as sokumen iriminage) or else picking up sankyo from a shoulder grab. Neither were particularly "my favorite techniques" during training - if asked at the time, I'd probably say either shihonage or udekeminage (also known as tenbin nage). But clearly my mind/body was reverting to some neural preference.

Fast forward a few years, and I'm training again, in a different town, different dojo, different style. Some classes we spend time working on variations from a given attack. One of my peers has a very mechanistic approach to this: he goes through "the eight basics" in the order he learned them. I can't do that. Rightly or wrongly, I figure I should have all the options at my fingertips, so to speak, and be able to do an appropriate opening and from there a technique will happen.

Turns out that oh maybe 8 times out of 10 the first thing I find is sayunage. Shihonage and udekeminage are close behind. I think the sankyo was so attack-specific that it just sort of fades from this scenario.

So after those, I start looking for other things, the myriad variations of body position, hand angle, and energy that allow different techniques to manifest. OH! So that's how I get from there to there and look...its kaitennage.

Similar things happen in the studio all the time. Favorite colors get mixed on the palette, however complex, seemingly without thinking about it, and patterns of brushstrokes dance across the canvas. The carrying strap for a weapons bag gets attached with its specific 7 direction, crossing stitch pattern in one smooth procedure; my hands and the steam iron turn and press the sides of a tanto sleeve. It is relaxing and reassuring.

But it's also part of the allure when a customer poses a design problem, or after years of doing seascapes one decides to do a landscape. Relaxing and reassuring is nice and it builds one's craft, but challenge is interesting. Without a puzzle to solve, even if it is a minor variation on an established theme, there is nothing to learn, no creative growth.

So muscle memory is good, but the mind, like muscle, needs to be exercised.