The Tao of Musashi

This is where my mind landed today while casting around randomly in my head for something to inspire some writing.  I wasn’t sure if I was writing in my blog or tooling around with a short story until I remembered I had this image, so the short story waits ’til tonight.

Miyamoto Mushashi’s Shrike on a Withered Branch.  There just has to be something enlightening there.  And there is.  It’s just not the same enlightenment every time.

Today, my mind is even less centered than usual.  When I was a child, my parents were told that I was hyperactive.  They weren’t using the ‘attention deficit’ nomenclature back then during the ice age.  I’d imagine that their reaction was to say “well, duh”.  It was pretty obvious and I’m sure it still is.  Some people center their minds, focus like lasers.  The closest my mind seems to do is impersonate an electron: it’s somewhere near the nucleus, but may teleport at random anywhere in the vicinity.  And sometimes not.

Staying in the vicinity of a topic can be a challenge.  Like right now, look up above, there’s a whole unrelated paragraph between the beginning and my topic.  Musashi brings my mind to origins and focus.  See, there’s a tie-in, I’m not as scatterbrained as I thought.

Musashi was an interesting character.  Often regarded as the greatest samurai to ever live, also an author, artist, pilgrim, hermit… his skills were the result of unrelenting focus and practice.  Yet he seems to have jumped around a bit, no?  How does one proceed from being the finest hand-to-hand killer on earth to writing a philosophical masterwork and producing fine brush art?

Well, one answer is focus.  Focus means doing what you are doing right now to the best of your ability, and seeing a task through to your intended end.  It doesn’t mean that you can’t move on to other, perhaps wildly unrelated things later.  I often feel like I’m being unfocused if there’s no theme to my day or week or year.  Well, that need not be true, if you’re finishing what you’re starting.  Life often hands you a big garage sale of miscellaneous junk.  No need to feel like you’re doing something wrong.  Perform triage and do what really needs doing.

The other answer is in not feeling attached to the past.  If the first answer strikes a chord with me, this answer sparks a whole symphony.  Musashi spent the first thirty-odd years of his life first learning to be a killer, and then actually being a killer.  Many people, at that point, would have simply resigned themselves to spending the rest of their years slinging a sword.  Musashi, however, realized he was getting tired of it, it wasn’t doing what it used to for him.  He felt he wasn’t developing as a human being, though he might have honed his considerable skills to an even finer edge had he persisted.

But it just didn’t feel important to him anymore.  So he left that life behind and did something new.  He applied the same heart to writing his book and creating his art, to travel and to the development of his mind.

Had he left part of his mind behind, clinging to his past, he likely would have produced some forgettable stuff.  But he didn’t.

I could proceed from this and draw a parallel with the life of an alcoholic or addict.  I think it’s obvious enough that you can do it easily, though, so I won’t belabor the point.  Really, it applies to just about any type of life, and anything you want to do with it.

Do what you’re doing, do it the best you know how, always seek to improve, and don’t be afraid to do something new.  If you jump ship to a new pursuit, do it with everything you’ve got.

And it’s never too late to begin, but it’s always too early to feel trapped.