Still Soft, Like Clay

I feel I'm still mush, often enough. My mind is soft and yielding, like pudding. I don't have much will to resist unproductive desires, for example eating. While I was really ill I lost ten or twenty pounds, but since then I've gained it all back and then more besides. Recently most of my diet has consisted of fast food, and a lot of it. In fact, I haven't been this heavy since I started iaido nine years ago. Essentially, weight and fitness-wise, I'm pretty much all the way back to the beginning, the bad old days you might say.

Speaking of iaido, that's the other problem -- I haven't touched my sword in at least six weeks. This means nationals are out of the question, as is making yondan on schedule. This will put me a year behind my peers, depending on how you look at it (some people prefer strict seniority over rank when discerning these matters), but either way, it's a serious loss.

I don't meditate either. Not on my own, and neither do I go to sangha. In a way I'm like the overweight lazy monks in one of the founding legends of shaolin kung fu: My body can't handle the sitting, so my mind does not sharpen, so I have no will to lose weight and gain fitness. It's a vicious circle. I guess I'm waiting for my Boddhidharma to come and teach me yoga.

I've had a lot of trouble getting out of bed in the morning. In a way this is the seed of all my problems -- I get out of work so late that I can't make it to meditation and can't make it to iaido practice either, on their respective evenings.

You ever hear that phrase, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger"? It's a partial truth; the hard part is left out: Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, because often becoming stronger is the only way to recover in the first place.

Maybe there is progress that isn't easily seen, even by myself. That's often the way of it in nature -- seeds germinate out of sight after all.