“You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life.”
― Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! It’s officially spring break week! Which mostly means I can get caught up on my work, other than teaching. Nevertheless, I admit I am ready for a bit of a break. To celebrate the beginning of break, after our morning walk, I whipped up some cheese crepes with homemade blueberry sauce (blueberries from last summer’s garden at the LHH). Crepes sound hard, but they are actually pretty easy - maybe a little more work than simple pancakes, but not much.
As I’ve mentioned, the wife and I are doing a “project 365”, which means we are taking a picture every day. On our walk this morning she stopped a couple of times to take pictures with her phone, looking for the image that would be her daily contribution to her project. She was a bit obsessed with fire hydrants today, and stopped at several as we walked through campus, but ultimately settled on a picture of T-Hall (UNH HQ). While we were walking, we talked about how engaging with a project like this changes how you move through your day. You start noticing things that you would have otherwise passed by without a pause. Things like how the snow is piled up around a fire hydrant, or the way the high-tension power lines lead out into the horizon in a cleared path through the woods. You become more appreciative of the simple beauty of the everyday. Pic at the top is of the wife taking her daily pic when we were up in Jackson a couple of weeks ago, to illustrate the point.
Are you familiar with the Austin Kleon quote I have at the top? I love his little book, Steal Like an Artist. It’s actually a secret career development book, if you just replace “artist” with whatever you happen to be pursuing (“steal like a hospital administrator”, “steal like a nurse”, “steal like a surgeon”). Anyway, you may have heard some variation of the quote, like, “You're The Average Of The Five People You Spend The Most Time With” or something like that. I am a believer that we are a mashup of the people and things we let into our lives. Our brains are highly plastic, even into old age, meaning they constantly, physically change in response to stimuli, especially social stimuli. And it is not just that our brains change in response to stimuli, but we are hardwired as the most social of social animals to change our behavior to fit in with whatever group we find ourselves in. This then, in the long run, leads to physical changes to your brain as your behavior creates new pathways just like walking through a field. The first time you walk through a field, you bend the grass a bit. The hundredth time, you grind the grass under foot into mud, leaving a clear trail that you will always go back to whenever you return to the field because it is the easiest way. The old saying, “You are what you eat” is true, and you are what you spend time with is also true. The people you spend the most time with create your social world, and change your patterns of behavior, which change your brain. Drawing on the Kleon quote, I think you can substitute media for people to a degree. If you spend hours each day watching the Kardashians, your values will gradually change to be more like theirs. If you don’t want your life to be a dumpster fire, I recommend minimizing your exposure.
This week I read a book by the American martial arts master, Dave Lowry, called Autumn Lightning. I actually swallowed it in two nights, not able to put it down. It is part memoir and part history of feudal Japan and his school of kenjutsu (traditional Japanese samurai sword fighting), the Yagyu Shinkage ryu. I have quoted Lowry before, and I borrowed the title of his book, The Sword and the Brush as the title of my farewell speech when I retired from the Army. I have dabbled in the martial arts on and off throughout my life, first karate when I was a kid in the 80’s and influenced by the wave of Japanese fascination when it seemed like the Japanese were going to simply buy all of America, to later in my 30’s and early 40’s, I studied judo and jiu-jitsu. I’m not a practitioner now, but I appreciate the life of dedication to the art that Lowry writes about and explains. Specifically, at the beginning of the book, he describes talking with his future sensei as his teacher agrees to take him on as a pupil. (Lowry uses the Japanese phrase bugei to refer to the totality of the study of martial arts.)
My host handed me a cup of tea and watched while I took a sip, trying not to grimace at its green bitterness. “Being a bugeisha, a pupil of the bugei is not something you…” he searched for the right word, “... adapt to your life. It means changing your life, almost in every way, to adapt to the bugei.” As an afterthought, he added, “More is expected of the bugeisha than of an ordinary person.” (p.8)
What Lowry’s teacher was telling him was that to become a true bugeisha, one must submit to the discipline of the art. The life-long dedication to the discipline transforms the self and allows for transcendence. Learning to fight is just the tool to get there. The practice of ritual forms called kata is one way to get to this transcendence. Lowry quotes his teacher again, “‘To perfect the kata’ he explained, ‘is to transcend everyday things. It is to reach seishi choetsu, the state beyond life and death.’” (p.86)
The practitioners of kenjutsu have two words for the sword in their practice. The first is satsujinken, the sword that takes life. The second is katsujinken, the sword that gives life. The study of the martial arts is at its base, the study of how to take another person’s life. One uses satsujinken in combat against others. But katsujinken is the sword one uses against the self:
Throughout a man’s years on earth, his spirit is destined to be assailed by doubts, the fears, and the desires that will never leave him in peace unless he overcomes them. For the corporeal opponents of flesh and blood and steel that he faced in duels, Yagyu bugeisha reserved his satsujinken, the sword that took life.
For the battles that went on inside, though, he needed a much stronger weapon, with a keener blade… This is the sword he called katsujinken, the sword that gives life.
The transformation of the sword in the bugeisha’s hands from a weapon that takes life to one that grants it is a long and arduous process.
This idea that the practice of the Eastern martial arts is about the battle within as much as the battle without is what has always appealed to me. Western martial arts - boxing, wrestling, fencing - can be just as effective as Eastern in terms of combat, but Eastern martial arts have always (in my experience and study) had a component of Zen Buddhism associated with them, whereas Western arts do not. This is not to say that the practice of Western styles does not also require self-mastery, just that self-mastery is not necessarily a key purpose of the practice. (Feel free to argue with me on this one - I am open to the idea that this is a matter of degree.)
The study of the martial arts is a worthy use of one’s time - one of many possible worthy studies - because it is good for you physically, it gives you a valuable skill (self defense), and because it helps you to transcend. The practice doesn’t just change your body, it also changes your mind. Submission to the practice changes you. But it is not the only worthy road.
I enlisted in the Army National Guard in 1989. I was a freshman at UMass when I learned that if you joined the Mass Guard, the state would waive your tuition. If it were not for that, I would not have joined. But I did not join only for the money. I joined because I believed the Army would be a way toward becoming a better person. Twenty six years later, I retired from the Army. My 18-year old self was correct, the Army did indeed make me a better person. The Army is not a martial art, but it does require submission. The oath that brings you into the military includes your promise of submission:
I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
I want to highlight that the submission is to the Constitution, and to the lawful orders of your superiors, as described by the Constitution, not to an individual. Membership in the Army (and other services) then requires an ongoing submission to the way of soldiering, whether ones duties are jumping out of airplanes and training to engage with the enemy or doing finance in a hospital, as I once did. Regardless, living the Army values whatever you may be doing transforms you. Being part of something larger than one’s self transforms you. Being part of something worthy transforms you. I came out the other side of almost 26 years of service a different person. Not just older - that would have happened, regardless. I was better. A better version of myself for submitting to the Army’s discipline and culture, for having let it in, for having tried to internalize it. Please don’t take this as me saying, I was great. I am better. I still have a long way to go to get where I want to be.
In the Sword and the Brush, Lowry explains the Japanese suffix “Do” (said like “dough”, not “due”), to mean “way”, as in “an important road”. Kendo is “the way of the sword”, judo is “the gentle way” (which is hilarious if you have ever been the object of a shoulder throw). Not all Do are of the martial variety, traditional Japanese flower arranging, the tea ceremony, and calligraphy are all Do’s, or ways toward enlightenment and transcendence. Lowry says,
[T]he Do may produce art. It may be of practical value. It is doing a thing not for the sake of doing it; it is doing a thing because it releases us from certain constraints of the limited self: narcissism, self-centeredness, preoccupations with the dears and worries and doubts that diminish us in daily life. The Way draws us into the domain of the potential self: self-realization, self-cultivation, and self-perfection. (p. 18)
My wife and I are following the Do of the camera this year. The discipline requires a daily picture. Submission to the discipline is transformative. As I said, it changes how you see the world. The point of the discipline is not just to get good pictures, the photographic equivalent of satsujinken. The point of the discipline is transcendence of the self, the photography equivalent of katsujinken, the camera that gives life. I don’t think there is a camera that takes life, but you hopefully get the point - it’s about the process, not the outcomes.
I am no longer on active duty with the Army. Instead I now serve the University and its mission. I follow the way of the professor, the Way of Health Administration Education, HAE-do, if you will. Becoming part of a worthy organization, internalizing it, is transformative. It does not have to a military service. But it does have to be a worthy organization.
You are a mashup of the things you let into your life. As David Foster Wallace once said, “There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” Or, in the words I have been using here, what do you submit to? You will submit to something. You must let things into your life. The things you let in will change you and shape you. The Kleon quote is a caution: we have to take care to let in the things that will perfect us, and to keep out the things that will contort us. This means choosing activities, people, and critically, organizations. Will you choose a Do that leads to transcendence? What will you let into your life?
I’ll be back Wednesday with links. As usual, willing good for all of you! Happy Sunday!
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