Dojo-cho’s Column 5 — When You Think It Is Too Late

There was a night when wind and rain rattled the windows until morning. Even though I slept badly, I woke up refreshed, probably thanks to the sweat I had shed at the dojo the evening before. I had just started training again after a month off, and my body and mind felt light.

When I invite people around me to train together, the answers are usually much the same: “At my age?” “I’ve been so tired lately.” “I’m busy with work.” I have been making the same invitation for more than twenty years, and colleagues who once said they wanted to try now say, “You can do it because you’ve kept at it. It’s too late for me now. I should have started back then.”

One morning I read a story about an old man in America. A volunteer suggested to a man well past seventy, who spent his days doing nothing but gazing at the sky, that he try learning to paint. He waved the idea away, asking what painting could mean at his age. The volunteer replied, “It seems to me the problem isn’t your age, but your belief that you can’t do it.” Taking those words to heart, he began to paint and went on holding exhibitions past the age of one hundred. This is the story of Harry Lieberman, who was called “the American Chagall.”

Looking back, the reason I did not do the things I wanted to do was not my circumstances or my age either. I simply did not do them.

When I was young, I trained only to become strong. To build fists and muscles harder than anyone else’s, I treated my still-growing body harshly. Not a few of the seniors and juniors who trained that way now suffer from pain in their wrist and knee joints. Just as there is no eternal youth, there was no one who stayed strong forever.

The aikido I met after thirty was different. It was not a martial art of using force to beat an opponent, but one that fills strength with softness and expresses strength through softness. The applied techniques you learned in this chapter are the same. The harder your partner comes in, the better the technique works, and the more you let go of force, the more the power of your whole body reaches your partner. That is why aikido is not too late to start even later in life; if anything, it is a martial way that deepens as you grow older.

At Jeju Oseung Dojo there are many members who put on a dogi for the first time past forty or fifty. People who were out of breath after a single breakfall at first go on, after a few years, to learn the techniques in this chapter one by one. Their technique has a calm you do not see in young people, just as a long life showed through in Harry Lieberman’s paintings.

“However slow, accuracy is the fastest way; however late, it is sooner than never starting.” These are words I am fond of. No one can go back to the past and start over, but anyone can start now and make a new ending. If you have read this book this far, I hope you will now knock on the dojo door.