Goodbyes

Sister J flew home today, having had a few days over here with us. Days characterised muchly by cold and rain, but we got a nice day in the city yesterday, and a nice day today to sit in bizarrely-slow and difficult traffic en route to the airport. All worked out without too too much of a delay though - in time for her to wait for an age and a day at the gate, for no apparent reason. She's safely home now though.

Here mrs tsuken took a photie of J and the kids and me as we wished her goodbye.

Flickr.

Later on (of course) I trained. On the way back from the airport we had stopped at Bunnings, and I got twelve packs of four foam jigsaw/inter-locking mats. Each $12 four-pack gives a square metre; from martial arts suppliers, 1sqm mats are $30 to $40 each. Good deal, I thought. So my training was on mats instead of on brick, concrete, or grass. Quite good, but also different in a somewhat unrealistic way, I thought: some styles of turn, for example, are very do-able on the mats, but slow and difficult on a real-world surface.

I was really struck by Kancho's emailed class notes from yesterday's class at the New Lynn dojo, in Auckland. Recently I asked him a question, and made another observation, relating to parts of the kata Heian Shodan, pretty much our most basic kata - that despite my dan grade (black belt) and that I'm working on quite a number of advanced kata. It seems to me that he was struck by that, as the next class he took, he had them working on Heian shodan, and he mentioned specifically the parts I asked and observed about. The notes from yesterday took it even further, with him doubling down on Heian shodan and telling them/us to work on it for the next month. I'm thinking he must have been taken by me actually devoting time and thought to a basic kata, and impressed enough by that and by the nature of my question/observations, to have that influence part of his teaching direction at the moment. 

I feel pretty good about that: it suggests to me that I am continuing to approach my study of karate-do in a thoughtful and thorough fashion - and in a way that appears to please my sensei.