5 april

Iaido, compassionate authority, kendo

When the months passed away, and I went from the introduction course to regular practice of Iaido, the art of drawing and cutting with a japanese katana, my closer friends wondered. Really? A martial art? they wondered and said no more. Because after all there was not much more to say. My friends know me and know that I am very prone to bounce hard against any type of authority. Their silence spoke sentences. How could I even think to learn something that seems to request blind obeyance to the teacher? A year passed, and I even start practicing Kendo, a japanese form of fencing. The questions became serious, and explicit. How could I possibly bear it? The hierarchy, the strictness of it all... is that really your thing? 

I confess that I am one of the more surprised. 

The first mild surprise was that, actually, is not so bad to accept the authority of somebody else. Probably due to my full ignorance on handling a sword, it wasn’t hard to take whatever was said to me, and try to learn it. And some things I learn. Iaido first, and kendo afterwards has actually taught me very many things in the few years I have practice them both. One of them, the one that I did not expect, was to discover that I actually did not despise authority. What I despise is careless authority. 

Since I have memory I have associated the word authority with the idea of somebody telling somebody else what to do. And of course, in many times I have bounced into well deserved authority, more or less easy to accept. I have met great thinkers that were very much willing to tell me about their discoveries and their achievements, thinkers that were better qualified than me to deal with the questions I was dealing with. Persons with well defined and well deserved authority in their fields of interest. As a  matter of fact I myself have tried, now and again, to gain such authority, to learn about something enough to allow me to teach it to others. There lies the bigger surprise. Learning Iaido I have learn that to know something, to know something well, is, by far and large, insufficient. I would like to say that for authority to be a constructive force, it has to be compassionate. 

Many of us have thought that passion, and not compassion, should be enough to gain authority. Our society frequently support such idea. Our years of doubt and uncertainty make that anybody with some sense of certainty, pretty much every other passionate person, gains authority sooner or later. But that is an ephimere thing, authority that vanishes as fast as it comes. Because we, passionate people, are only busy with ourselves and our passions, busy with that consuming flame the burns high and bright... or shall I say that consuming flame that burn us high and bright? But that fire is not enough to lead others. It does not yields enduring authority. Because authority is not about us, the ones that have it, or want to have it. Authority is about the ones under it. 

And that is what I slowly discovered in practicing a martial art designed few hundred years ago, an art actually designed to transform a warrior, a human train to kill others, into a human capable of lead others. Capable of hearing others, and caring for others. I have attended uncountable classes, I have sit through more lectures that I want, or can, remember. But it so happened that when the eyes of my japanese sensei met mine, across the abyss of culture and age, it did happen that I was seen. I actually saw that this person, expert in the art of her ancestors to a level that I will never reach, actually care about me learning what she had to teach. 

At that moment I could do whatever she would have told me to. Because she actually looked at me, and cared.