Coming Home
by Branislav Vasilijevic
When I started practicing aikido in Belgrade, I was 13, had two years of Judo experience and
two simple motives to learn to fight and to get a black belt. It seemed to make more sense to tie
someone into knots than to punch his brains out that s what made me choose Aikido. By the
time I reached 1st kyu (at the age of 16) my self-confidence and my "standing" among my
hormone-oozing teenage peers was way up, but something in me had started to change. I was one
step away from the black belt and I found I could not care less about it. My motivation was still
there, just different. What mattered now was perfecting technique, expanding my repertoire and
building the "feel" for movement. However, even that focus could not last, at least not as I
understood it at the time. After two more years of concentrated practice, I was drafted into
military service, and when I returned two years later, my enthusiasm had dampened considerably.
I kept going to classes once or twice a week until I left for the U.S. at the age of 21.
Three more years passed (two in the U.S. and one in Canada) without aikido. Then, quite accidentally, I ended up watching an Intro class at the Bloor Valley, and so the seed was planted. About two months later, it blossomed into a deep urge to return to Aikido, but it did so only because the soil was nourishing. As a wise man once wrote:
- "It again grows warmer around him, yellower, as it were; feeling and feeling for others acquire depth, warm breezes of all kinds blow across him. It seems to him as if his eyes are only now open to what is close at hand. He is astonished and sits silent: where had he been? These close and closest things: how changed they seem! What bloom and magic they have acquired! He looks back gratefully — grateful to his wandering, to his hardness and self-alienation, to his viewing of far distances and bird-like flights in cold heights."
And so it is that I returned to Aikido. But it is not all milk and honey. Coming back to practice after three years of absence can do a lot to your body, especially to joints and tendons. It is an ordeal just to kneel on the mat before class, not to mention the constant challenge that suwari-waza presents. There is also a bunch of bad habits that I've developed and that now require attention. There are differences in approach, especially in the role of uke (for example, I was taught to do rolls whenever possible and save breakfalls only for "emergencies") to which I still have to adjust in order not to spoil nage's practice. However, once I am on the mat, all of this fades away. The only thing that exists is the technique at hand. Not individual movements, not the feelings, only the technique as an integral whole. True enough, movements and feelings are there, but only as two aspects of one deeper reality. When I descent to that point, true art begins and I am a beginner forever, for when the journey is infinite, we are always just a step away from the start. I would not have it any other way since...
- "...wonder continues to bubble up, and joy rushes to the surface, with release in the recognition and liberation in the awakening. And we all know how to wonder, which speaks in the tongues of that God within, and inexplicably points home."
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