Love and Fear

"We Contribute to Our Own Failure" was a post recently made on Pat's site and if you're reading this, please go there and click on his link to the Classic Aiki Story there. My post is in reference to that. Someone special to me once said that humans only have two emotions and all other emotions are derived from those two. Those two emotions are love, and fear. I thought about this concept and how it fit into my aiki training. It's true, I'd love to get into a classic example of a mugger taking an old lady's purse and gracefully tossing him to the earth, handing the lady back her purse and have her thank me. When I really sat down and thought about why I'd like a real life situation to occur for my Aikido though, it's not out of some need for gratitude, it's out of fear. Fear that maybe what I'm learning I won't be able to perform when I really need to. Fear that I'd let my Sensei and myself down when it really came down to it. Therefore, I want a black and white confrontation to have a definite answer. Pat's was about there not usually being a black and white circumstance. Mine's about this desire to test my skills being misled. I keep doing Aikido because I love Aikido. I get immense joy out of blending with someone and moving with them. I get just as much out of being Uke and letting Tori toss me and improving someone else's Ability. While I was down at the Mokuren dojo for my Aiki weekend, Pat was telling me about how almost everyone who gets into Aikido initially gets into it because it seems magical and there seems an element of control over another person that we all want to learn. The farther we progress though we learn that the idea of controlling someone else is an illusion and we start liking it for what it really is. The higher up the chain of Aikidoka you go however, the more "magical" the abilities of people seem to be, even to those that practise Aikido already, until they get to that point, and so on, and so on. I'd just like everyone reading this to really ask themselves why they got into Aikido initially (the actual motivation), and why they're still doing it.