Make the whole movement

9 June

In the early days of living in Venezuela my father managed to get himself hired as a tennis teacher. I don’t believe that he had ever taught tennis before, but he could teach and we all liked tennis, surely back in the seventies when the argentinian Guillermo Vilas almost challenged Bjorn Borg, and tennis was indeed the sport of the gentlefolk. Overnight, in the eating table a couple of books on tennis teaching were present and were commented too. I read them, and eventually I joined the lessons. I still remember one drawing, illustrating a forehand. The arms of a player and his racquet hand drew an eighth figure and I could not understand what was it all about. I could have understood a movement from the back to the front… but an eight? what kind of unneeded swinging was that?

A son of his time, my father explained that beautiful movements were effective movements. Years later, when I started climbing I could see that the real gifted climbers were beautiful to see, always elegantly moving on the vertical rock. But what is elegant and beautiful anyway? What was it what gave them the elegancy? Pirsig would argue that we all recognise beauty when seeing it… but how to learn something that we can identify but not describe? How to teach it?

It is summer in Utrecht. With one or another impossible task, like finding a present for a wedding few hours away, I slide along the streets under the sun and between the people and their skin, finally liberated from winter clothes. It is hard to say that anybody is ugly, but it is fairly easy to point the few really beautiful persons that cross my sight. I could talk, probably for hours without end, about soft curves and naked shoulders, long necks and well defined jaw-lines. I even believe that if I take care of the right words, you my reader could agree with my ideas on the beauty of the people of Utrecht. And yet I would be missing something.

The really beautiful people I see carry themselves with purpose.

My fencing teachers keep on talking about making a whole movement of each of the swings of the katana. With the pass of time, I have come to believe that it is not quite about the whole trajectory, but about its purpose. All what starts have to end, as much as what moves have to go somewhere without stoping before, without distraction, without pause. There is continuity in purpose because, after all, is there anything of what we do that we can call really ended? We will always go on, at least as long as we are alive, but how incredibly different is to go on somewhere, or just to go on because we should.

So I see the many that make a step and doubt about it, the ones that wonder if they should go somewhere else, if they should go faster, or slower. I see the doubt, the stress, the fear of the future, that thing called future that is the mere continuation and consequence of what we are doing right now.  We doubt and fear, and our movements don’t end but change half way, never complete, never of a steady purpose.

And so I remember that eight of the tennis player, horizontal like the ongoing lemniscate, without doubt and with purpose, and I see the sharp edge of the katana of my teachers piercing the air in never stopping circles and see these beautiful people of Utrecht, walking under the sun, with a smile, and a firm step.

Making the whole movement, indeed.