My brother has a doctorate in biochemistry and certainly, when he was younger, he was not prone to a poetic turn of phrase, but one day, sitting in the living room of the first house my wife and I bought, in front of the open fire we had just had put in, watching the coal burn, he said, “You know, we are being heated by the warmth of the sun from 300 million years ago.”
What he went on to explain to me was that those trees that had become the coal had grown by synthesising the warmth and light of a sun that had shone on them when dinosaurs roamed the earth, 65 million years before the first primitive man walked upright. When they died all that energy had been stored in their trunks until, millions of years later, compressed into coal, I released it with a little kindling and paper. Even the kindling was warmth from a sun that had helped the tree to grow perhaps ten years ago.
And the food I eat is last week or last month’s sun. I’m a vegetarian, so I think about the vegetables I buy and the pasta or rice in my larder, but if you eat meat, then the lamb on your plate could have been warmed by the Spring sunshine and the beef could be last year’s or the year before that. And that is without considering frozen meat and canned vegetables.
Although it didn’t strike me at the time, it’s a metaphor for aikido. It’s actually a metaphor for life as well, but, obviously, because I spend a lot of time either practising or thinking about Aikido, you could say that, for me, everything is a metaphor for Aikido, so let me explain:
I started Aikido over forty years ago now. If I’ve got any better in that time, it’s because of the practise I put in over those years. And any technique I perform now is a result of all the practice I put in over the years. What I do now is a result of everything I did then.
So these creaky old bones are being warmed by the sun of what a younger, fitter man did in the past. It’s a nice thought. It also means that what I do now will be the warmth for a much older man – if I live that long.
And, of course, every tree was different and every one that fell and turned into coal wasn’t perfect. Some grew crooked, some fell too soon or grew old and decayed. There were tall ones, short ones, conifers and tree ferns, seed -bearing trees and spore-producing ones. And all of them went on to become the fires that warm us, and the energy that powered our progress from a long time.
The same is true of my practice of Aikido. Over the years I have got a lot more wrong that I’ve got right, and it is those things that tend to stick in my mind. And that holds true of my life in general – like most people, the failures are the things we remember. That is not to say that we don’t recall the good times - in Aikido, the perfect “how on earth did that happen” techniques, the grading where everything went right, starting our own dojo; and in life, our partners, our children, our grandchildren, our first car, our first home, holidays – it’s just that psychologically negative emotions require more thinking than positive ones, so we tend to mull over unpleasant events more than happy ones.
The solution that Stephen Russell, the Barefoot Doctor, proposed to spending too much time in your forebrain was moving your attention back into the centre brain region, away from the constant internal dialogue. This he claims activates the energy in the pineal gland which is known as the third eye chakra, or ajna chakra in the Hindu system. A closed ajna is said to lead to confusion, uncertainty, cynicism, and pessimism. Whether or not you believe that, it is still a reasonably accurate description of how we dwell on the bad rather than the good.
Bad events usually have more impact than good ones so losing money or friends or being criticised have a greater effect than winning money, making friends or getting praised. And bad events wear off quicker than good ones. In interviews with adults up to fifty years old “a preponderance of unpleasant memories, even among people who rated their childhoods as having been relatively pleasant and happy,” Roy F. Baumeister, a professor of social psychology at Florida State University, wrote in an article in The Review of General Psychology.
And there’s even an evolutionary argument about why we tend to dwell on the bad rather than the good. To quote Professor Baumeister again:
(Those who are) “more attuned to bad things would have been more likely to survive threats and, consequently, would have increased the probability of passing along their genes. Survival requires urgent attention to possible bad outcomes but less urgent with regard to good ones.”
And since it seems we can’t stop thinking about them, maybe we need to value them, instead of allowing them to make our life miserable. Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, called this process “individuation”, the process by which we unify our consciousness and unconsciousness, the things that go to make up our personality.
These things are, after all, what made us what we are – I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this were it not for all the good things that have happened in my life (so many that I cannot begin to count them), but also for those bad times, unhappy moments in my childhood, crummy jobs and difficult people, plus all those terrible techniques, getting bawled out in front of the whole class by particular sensei who had a samurai complex, injuries, embarrassments … it’s all turned into the coal that warms these older bones now.