Aikido'Ka

Grass Valley's Family Martial Arts School -- Focus, Fitness & Fun

Respect

For Real Success, Embrace Your Failures

Failure is the key to success

Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something.

O’Sensei Morihei Uehsiba, Founder of Aikido

When practicing aikido, or any other martial art, we often focus on over coming our attacker. We want to succeed at the technique we’re practicing. And we want to throw — with power! While this makes sense, in a lot of ways, it’s misguided.

Yes, we should practice our techniques carefully to improve our skills. Perfect practice makes perfect, after all. But our learning mostly doesn’t come from getting things right. Getting a technique or movement correct, doesn’t teach us how to improve ourselves. Getting the technique right simply confirms that we understand what’s going on to a certain extent. While that’s certainly valuable, it’s not learning something new.

We start learning new things when we fail. Making mistakes gives us the opportunity to change our behavior and adjust our understandings to more accurately conform to reality. We can then adjust our movements and techniques to refine them so that they work better.

Do your utmost best. Then embrace your failures. Doing so will speed up your learning and make every aspect of training more fun.

In this way, aikido practice is different than school. In school, you are supposed to get everything right. Your grades reflect how correct your answers have been in homework, tests and class participation. If you make a mistake in front of class, that’s an opportunity for humiliation. Mistakes are frowned upon. In school, failure is as bad as it gets.

At the dojo, we support and learn from each other. We all make mistakes regularly and help each other overcome those mistakes. We get in front of class and show how we’re having difficulties and we turn those failures into learning. We embrace our mistakes and use them for self-improvement. And fun.

Why Aikido’Ka Won’t Be at this Year’s Fair or Why Elephant Rides and Respect Don’t Mix

African elephant photo
Elephants are not carnival rides. Image from Wikipedia.

An Open Letter to the Community,

My name is Frank Bloksberg. I have lived in Nevada City for about 18 years. I am a lawyer and run a martial arts school, in Grass Valley, called Aikido’Ka. At Aikido’Ka, we train in aikido – known as the “Art of Peace.” Aikido’Ka is different than other martial arts schools, because we are dedicated to peacefully resolving disputes and performing community service. For instance, we have raised over $13,000 and 6,000 pounds of food for the Food Bank.

Aikido’Ka has been open for 6 years. We’ve had a booth at every County Fair since we’ve been open. The County Fair is a huge outreach opportunity for us. We meet a lot of our future students there. Deciding not having a booth is a really big deal for us.

Aikido is based upon respect – respect for our fellow students, teachers, our training space. The respect inherent in aikido is a deep, profound respect. Without the support, trust and willingness of our fellow practitioners, we cannot practice the art and improve ourselves in the ways that aikido provides.

By design, the respect that we learn spreads to the rest of our lives. And for that reason, I have to seriously consider the respect/ethical implications of supporting a Fair that offers elephant rides to entertain children.

Elephants are intelligent, wild and very dangerous animals. The only way to help ensure that they are reasonably safe in unpredictable public situations is to use training techniques that are extremely powerful. We know that the training techniques involve some pain and fear.

Whether the training techniques are brutal or abusive doesn’t matter. One may be able to argue in good faith that abusing a creature is ethical for an incredibly important purpose. Or one may be able to argue in good faith that causing pain and fear in a creature is ethical for a really good reason. I might disagree with these arguments, but one may be able to make the arguments in good faith.

In my personal view, the value of entertaining children with an elephant ride is trivial, at best. In other words, what a child receives from riding an elephant is not worth putting the elephant through anything at all. It certainly cannot justify taking elephant babies from their mothers or putting elephants in fear or pain. It certainly cannot justify the risks involved in moving elephants around the country and placing them in unpredictable public situations where they can hurt people.

To me, the only ways to conclude that elephant rides are appropriate is to consider the rides of far greater value than I do or to completely disregard the elephants’ interests. Please do not think that I am placing the elephants’ interests over human interests. I am saying that we must consider the elephants’ interests to ethically decide what to do. And, here, where the value received from elephant rides is so small in comparison to the harms inherent in offering elephant rides, I cannot ethically support the rides.

Now that I have concluded that offering elephant rides at the Fair is unethical, should Aikido’Ka have a booth or perform aikido demonstrations at the Fair? If respect means anything, acting respectfully must include acting ethically.

If Aikido’Ka supports the Fair by participating and paying our fees, then we directly and indirectly support the presence of the elephant rides. We would support the rides directly because HTWT will not be paying the Fair anything at all. So we would, in part, be paying for HTWT’s presence. We would support the rides indirectly by letting the Board know that we will support their decisions even if those decisions are unethical.

We could have a booth and place a banner saying that we don’t support the elephant rides. We cannot do that, because that seems hypocritical to me. We’d be supporting HTWT’s presence, while trying to convince everyone that we didn’t.

For these reasons, and others, we won’t have a booth at this year’s Fair.

Each year at the Fair, we offer a “Fair Special.” The Special is always really good. Since we won’t be at the Fair this year, we’ll be offering a really good “Un-Fair Special.” Please watch for it. We’ll announce it soon.