PHOTO: FELINE NEWAZA!So, I'm working on this "quilt challenge" put out by a local quilting guild. Each participant is given a piece of identical fabric: a quilting cotton in a simple black and white check pattern, the individual squares about 1/4". All if it is to be used, somehow, in the top of the quilt. Other than that, one is free to use any technique or quilt pattern, to incorporate any colors. But the only types of fabric that are to be used are checks, stripes, dots or plaids.
It struck me this evening that in both the creative and the martial arts, consciously or not, we go through a process of solving a puzzle by moving from (too) many options to ever narrower limits until, finally, there is one inevitable solution left.
Thirty six or thirty seven years ago, an art teacher told me a story. I'm afraid I don't remember who he was paraphrasing, but this is the creative process he ascribed to a famous artist:
"When I start a painting, the room is crowded. My friends and family, everybody I've known, read about, heard of, they are all in there with me. I begin to paint. Quietly, one by one, they leave. Finally it is just me and the painting. Then I leave."
As a teenager, the "moral of the story" for me was the separation of the art from the artist. It taught me a lot about how to finish a painting.
But as I've gotten older, what I've taken from the story is trusting a reductive process. Each shape of color I add to the canvas rules out certain future choices and in doing so points the way to the next "best" choices to mix and apply.
The quilt challenge has me working this process very deliberately, since I started with their rules, developed certain design concepts I wanted to use, and "designing as I go" from the central motif out, I find the aesthetic decisions working within ever narrower parameter. It makes me think of aikido jiyuwaza, or "doing variations". Someone will come at you with a specified attack, and you are free to use any technique. Except you're actually not. It really ought to be a known aikido technique, part of that particular dojo's curriculum and not, say, a kick to the head or a left hook or an aikido throw nobody in that dojo knows how to safely receive.
Furthermore, the attack may be specified, but the energy of the attacker is a wild card. If it is, say, intensely rushing at you, faster than you expected, your best choices would be limited to the range of techniques that involve "late entry," letting the attack fully develop and really receiving it. You might do so while turning aside, perhaps even making a 180 degree pivot as the attacker goes past.
But then there might be a major size disparity between the two of you, or the attacker may have an injury you are aware of; she may be coming at you with one hand instead of both hands, or aim the attack at a different angle than the last person did...
If you have decided ahead of time "I'm going to do xyz technique on the next attack," you are making an arbitrary decision that can be inappropriate to the reality that is going to unfold in your face in the next fifteen seconds.
If you allow the process, you are not guaranteed of a "good" or "the right" result, any more than an artist is assured of always making something that is successful in pleasing himself or the buying public. But you are going to put the odds on your side. With lots of mindful practice, paying attention to how different responses to the variables end up with different results, you will learn to trust the process and narrow your choices down to get closer to the results you want more often.
