Glory days

Hogga winning Intervarsity Long Jump

OK, a little contrived perhaps, and obviously written to suit this 1982 picture, but still I thought that each life has its golden moments when everything is working in harmony. In martial arts it is known as "flow" and in the three years I studied with Kyoshi Chiba in Zimbabwe I achieved it a couple of times. Like the perfect golf shot in a round of hacking and slicing, it is that few seconds of being in perfect synchrony that brings one back for the next round.

I enjoyed studying martial arts I must say. Not that I was particularly good at it, being constructed more on the lines of a sumo wrestler than of Bruce Lee. Fortunately the style I selected, Shorin Ryu Shorinkan, is a power style with close, compact stances. See more at http://www.shorin-ryu.co.za/nakazato.htm which will give the biography of the Master of the style. A diminutive and wily Oriental by all accounts, yet I have seen a video of him in his seventies sending a fourth-dan Caucasian twice his size flying through the air with a well-executed nudge from his shoulder.

Another way of looking at it is perhaps to think of living in the moment. Not quite carpe diem, because that implies a view that the next day might be your last, but more an absorption in the "now" that transcends all else. It is indeed rare, especially for an easily-distracted type like me, but I remember the nights I worked in the Casualty department of Mpilo Hospital in Bulawayo when the flow of bleeding Matabele (they have a merry habit of walloping each other with sticks and stones of a payday evening) was continuous and my suturing work was precise and quick. One time I recall putting in something like 27 hours continuous work and only realising I was tired when I fell over.

In Norwich we have the few remnants of the anchoress cell of Dame Julian of Norwich - http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/julianbio.htm - a genuine English mystic who was confined in a cell (voluntarily of course, that's what being an anchorite or anchoress is all about) adjoining the church of Saint Julian. Hence the name she took. She wrote what is believed to be the first book published by a woman - "Revelations of Divine Love" in around 1393 - and is famous for her devotion, focus and optimisn ("All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well" is one of her sayings).

Now I'm not suggesting that my dear readers wall themselves up in a cell, leaving only a small aperture for the ingress of food and the egress of unmentionable substances, but I do think that we sometimes miss the point of life in our relentless scramble to collect more toys than anyone else. I have been as guilty as any, if not as successful, but I am now wondering how different things might have been if I had collected people rather than things. Invested in relationships instead of property. Not being morbid, folks, just musing a little on how easy it is to pursue the material and neglect all the other components of life.

As Douglas Adams wrote

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979

Ah well, enough introspection for this year. I'm off to the gym and then it's back to the office to earn some more pieces of paper. At least the work is engaging, challenging and complex and that is great for my grasshopper mind. And I have a cunning plan for some community involvement that will allow me to socialise and do real "boy stuff". More later.