Recovering from Imperfections

September 27, 2008

in Martial Arts

If imper­fec­tion is not wel­come then you will not be sta­ble when per­fec­tion fails.

When I read the post about per­fec­tion­ism from Shi­han Doug Wil­son, I thought about all the times I’d messed up a tech­nique in the dojo. And then I real­ized, I’d done more messed up tech­niques in my 10 years learn­ing Bujinkan Tai­jutsu than per­fect ones.

But Doug made me think that the golden moments weren’t those shin­ing rar­i­ties where I pulled off per­fect tech­niques. They were prob­a­bly those moments when I didn’t do a tech­nique prop­erly, but still recov­ered from it and kept myself safe.

Since real life is messy, maybe learn­ing how to do a per­fect tech­nique isn’t as impor­tant as learn­ing how to recover from an imper­fect one.

Or, to extrap­o­late into a Zen moment: seek not per­fec­tion, but the abil­ity to bounce from your imper­fec­tions and do it anyway.

Related Posts

  1. Per­fec­tion in Motion
  2. A Ques­tion about Psy­cho­log­i­cal Self-Defense

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: