Try the carrot salad

Some years ago we were at an Aikido Bridge seminar hosted by the fabulous Lisa Tomoleoni Sensei. The special guest was Hiroshi Ikeda Shihan (also fabulous), and he talked about opening your mind to new ideas. His metaphor was carrot salad.

If someone offers you carrot salad, you should try it. Don't just say, "Oh, I've had carrot salad and I know what it tastes like." Each person has their own take on it, and there is something to be gained by trying to understand what the cook was going for. It's become our family metaphor for remaining open-minded to the expertise of others.

In aikido (as well as other martial arts and Zen Buddhism), we talk about shoshin, or "beginner's mind". We are reminded to approach everything with openness, not as a prisoner of our preconceptions. We need this every day in training, because we were all there when Sensei said, "Attack with a face punch", so it's not so hard to know what's next when your partner comes at you. You have to forget that you know in order to train in the moment. Trust me, it's hard.

When you attend seminars or visit other dojo, we think it's especially important to try the carrot salad. The whole point in these cases is to encounter new ideas, after all. But often, we come across people in these situations who seem to be intent on taking the opportunity to impress upon all these strangers how good they are at doing a given technique, but doing it the way they are used to. I have often said that one of the best ways to understand how something works is to take it apart, or even to break it. It's something that we try to remind ourselves to do with our aikido (although mine feels pretty broken most of the time anyway). I don't know if this is easier for Evie or for me. In my case, I don't have years of muscle memory invested in doing something a certain way, so maybe I have an edge. On the other hand, very little of my movement is automatic, so I have to think and remember almost all of the details, such as remembering to not get punched in the face. It can sometimes be hard to savor the carrot salad when you are thinking about all the little details that become automatic after years of training. If you take a swing at Evie, she's gone before you are done deciding to do it, so maybe she has an edge because she has more brain space available to think about what's being taught.

Last spring we heard Endo Seishiro Shihan (fabulous, but a little scary) talk about this. He asked everyone to forget everything they knew up until the moment that class began, and to embrace his ideas fully for the duration of the seminar. Everyone was free to discard any or all at the end of the program, but only by fully immersing yourself in his aikido could you determine if he had anything to teach you. Spoiler alert: Endo Sensei has things to teach you. A lot of things.

This also reminds me of one of my favorite quotations, which has been attributed (apparently incorrectly) to Mark Twain: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know that just ain't so."

I have lots more to say on the subject of transmission of expertise, but I'll save it for another day. Until then, enjoy the carrot salad, whatever it tastes like!