I hate baseball. The highschool I went to was a baseball mecca. I wasn't good at it. I was afraid of the ball. If you ever have gotten hit in the head with a baseball, it hurts like hell. If you have ever struck out at the bottom of the last inning that hurts a lot worse. Being judged by your peers by fourth grade hurts a whole hell of a lot worse than that.
Here's an Okie word puzzle/mandala
iSHitODontAkNow.
Its a cosmic yinyang mixture of "I dont know shit." and shodan. Not to sound like Morty Youshiba, but Aikido exists in there as well.
I've labeled our super 8, and super 17, and Grande 10 as shit work. The material definition of shitwork: trivial, unrewarding, tedious, dirty, and disagreeable chores. If I label our basic Katas as shitwork, I'm really meaning "I don't know shitwork." Not knowing shit is often unrewarding, trivial, and tedious, until you are cool with not knowing shit. Then you enter a higher state of take it or leave it. or "I'm ok and you are ok." of 1970s speak.
When I explain Maai to someone, I bring up baseball. The distance between a pitcher and his catcher. The distance where baseball tends to work.
This is the distance where you can either strikeout, get hit, or knock a home run. here is another OKIE KOAN for you. " there are no base hits in Aikido.
some branches of Tomiki aikido are known for tanto randori.
The super 17 with a tanto. a lot of home runs because its coach pitch.
heres another version of the 17. machine pitch. some basehits
this is bee tanto randori. the bees dont give a shit about homeruns, or whether its a soccer match. rules get in the way for the bees. they just like flowers. a lot of our aikido "rules" are based on what someone is supposed to do. and this may sound a little bit like Morty Youshiba but maybe we should ask, " what is a bee supposed to do?" Then maybe we should go back to our I dont know shitwork and try to figure it out for ourselves.
iSHitODontAkNow.