The Magic Toy Cupboard.
Martial arts secrets; what is within your grasp and what is hidden from you.
A flight of fantasy, but please bear with me.
The story begins – Imagine that you are a young child and for whatever reason your parents have moved house.
The house you have moved into is very old with lots of nooks and crannies and odd architectural details.
Your parents introduce you to your new bedroom; up two flights of stairs and at the end of a short corridor. Over time, you settle in, bringing all your own familiar stuff to stamp your identity on the space that is now yours.
The room is square and bright with a window that looks out over rooftops, but inside the room, what catches your attention is a small cupboard door set above the skirting. You assume that the door probably gives access to some kind of loft space full of pipes and lagging, with water tanks and other stuff kids don’t need to worry about – adult stuff; and, for a while, you forget about it.
Until one rainy afternoon, and, out of boredom and a slight nagging sense of curiosity, you decide to explore the cupboard.
It has a latch, and that fact alone suggests it’s okay to try it.
Turning it and giving it a tug, you find that it doesn’t move. But, with a little experimentation, you discover that somehow, illogically, the door doesn’t open outwards into the room; it opens inwards into the space behind. So, you give it a shove.
Curiosity is eating you up, this is so exciting. But, frustratingly, it only opens a tiny crack, it’s as if there is something blocking it from behind. A little effort and another push and something seems to ever-so-slightly give, but only a measly three inches.
The light from the window allows you to see a small way into the space behind, and in the gloom, you observe a jumble of objects, brightly coloured, tightly-packed, different sizes and designs; it’s not a loft space, it’s a child’s toy cupboard, seemingly long abandoned.
You find that, at a push, you can get your hand in and part of your arm, but it’s an effort, you have to be determined.
Eventually, squeezing your arm through the gap, after much huffing and puffing, your hand falls upon something small, something that you realise that with a little working and twisting you can remove from the cupboard, and, excited by curiosity, you pull out one of the toys to see it in the light of day. And there it is, in all its possibilities; something to explore and to exercise your creative imagination on.
It doesn’t matter what it is; that would be a distraction, it can be anything you want it to be, that is the beauty of toys in the hands of a child. Like all exploration that is powered by imagination it is loaded with potential.
Closer examination reveals that this particular toy had been through many hands, you are not the first to discover it. It appears that many small fingers have explored its worn surfaces. So, it’s clear that you are not the first child to stumble across this toy cupboard, and it also dawns on you that all the children before you had exactly the same problem; in that the door was partially jammed and they could only reach through to the nearest objects. Surely, at some time in the long-distant past, it must have been fully accessible, but when, and to who?
The gloom behind suggests tantalising glimpses of objects going right back into the space, which seems to go on for ever; but these objects look as if they haven’t been touched for many many years, if at all.
Now let me take this apart and link it to the martial disciplines.
The toy cupboard is the unknown, but ‘unknown’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘never explored’ (although it might).
Access to the deeper reaches of this mystery is limited by effort and time; that’s why the length of your arm might be significant.
If you limit yourself to only expending so much effort you will only be able to access the objects nearest to you; the ones that everyone else has accessed.
The objects nearest the front are your introduction to the possibilities of the seemingly endless toy cupboard. They are important because they were the beginning of the puzzle, the items that became the talisman of the exploration of an idea.
At this point you don’t know where the journey will take you, but, like a compass, they give you a direction.
Also, you have the possibilities to get creative; perhaps you can use one object to reach deeper and hook out another object that would normally be out of reach? It all depends on effort and the willingness to make connections, to problem-solve to gain access.
I could keep on extending this metaphor, but I will quit while I think I am ahead.
To sum it up; it doesn’t take a lot of unpacking; this is about a journey, almost like one of those ‘quest’ things, like Bunyon’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. But, typically, it is limited by the usual human restrictions; time, effort, motivation, willingness to expend energy, concentration and focus, essentially DRIVE.
It has endless potential.
At risk of getting too woo-woo and tugging on my non-existent beard, Otsuka Hironori, the founder of Wado Ryu karate is supposed to have said, “Martial Arts technique is like the cosmos, it is infinite. Know that there are no such things as limits”.
He is right.
Martial arts.
So, if we applied this directly to our own martial arts study, our journey. The objects within our reach, the ones that everyone else has played with; they are just your basic introductory items. In themselves their true value becomes apparent only after you have experienced them in the context of the other objects that you have to struggle to reach. And, as mentioned, they become tools to enable you to reach the deeper aspects, the things normally out of the reach of lesser humans.
What of the things that lurk in the deeper recesses of the magic toy cupboard?
In martial arts terms, are these things mythical, or are they real?
Maybe, to some, the reality of these objects might be a massive disappointment… ‘Is that it? Is that all there is to it?’ Sometimes some of the most profound things come in the most unassuming packages and the beauty and the genius is in the simplicity.
Perhaps the answer is, ‘Yes it really is that simple, but at the time you first encountered it you weren’t ready for it’.
Across a number of these blog posts I have made reference to martial artist and writer Ellis Amdur, and I will reach for his insight again. He speculates that in the deepest recesses of martial arts skills, the aspects that to outsiders verge on the superhuman are often the result of focussed but inhumanly tedious practices, methods that are so mind-numbingly boring that only the most obsessive, insanely-driven (and time-rich) individuals would be prepared to endure.
It occurs to me that we do get glimpses of things that are lurking further back that we can reach; occasionally something or someone will supply us with a shaft of light, a moment of temporary illumination, to give us a clue as to what is possible. And then it’s gone, but the inspiration remains.
Of course, there is always another option. You could just ignore the cupboard door, and in blissful innocence be content with what you have got, making the best with what’s already in front of you.
I hear that Lego is really good.
I will leave the last word to once popular UK/Irish entertainer, Val Doonican. His song ‘My Marvelous Toy’ lodged itself in my brain as a child. Maybe that’s where the metaphor came from?
Photo by Claus Pescha on Unsplash
oh yes Tim, the English title is "You Must Change Your Life". And if you want to enjoy a thorough observation of Western post-modern culture I dare to recommend you this...
Reminds me of a quote from one of my favourite philosophers Peter Sloterdijk, who in one of his books "You must change your life", attempts to provide us with a strategy for existential meaning. The quote goes as follows (and replacing the word 'sport' with 'budo' here):
“Give up your attachment to the comfortable ways of life - show yourself in the gymnasium (gymnos = 'naked'), prove that the difference between perfect and imperfect does not leave you indifferent, show us that achievement - excellence, arete, virtue - has not remained a foreign word to you, admit that you have motives for new endeavours! Above all: give the presumption that sport is a pastime for the most stupid the space it deserves, do not misuse it as a pretext to drift further into your usual state of self-loathing, distrust the philistine in yourself who thinks you are fine the way you are! Hear the voice from the stone, don't resist the call to get in shape! Seize the opportunity to train with a god!”