Start by looking and listening

Ohara-sensei's theme for the first week of the year was to start by looking and listening.

At Seishinkan dojo's kagamibiraki ceremony, attended by 130 kids, adults and family members, he talked about starting by looking and listening using the example of school. It's easy to focus your ki on what you are good at, he said, on the things that you enjoy doing. But I want all of you to become people who can turn their attention on what they are not good at. This is difficult to do. You don't want to look at something you have failed at or someone you don't like. You can start by simply looking at whatever it is. Say you get good grades at school - except for math. You think you're no good at math, it's too hard, you don't like it. Well, you can get good at math. The way to start is to first simply look at your textbook. Read a little bit. And when you are sitting in your math class, listen to your teacher. That is all you need to do to start. You will start to understand a little bit more. And then your grades will go up a little bit. If you keep repeating this over and over, your understanding will continue to increase, you will be able to do math better, and your grades will improve.

At adult classes during the week, Ohara-sensei talked about the old uchideshi system in which the student's primary responsibility was to take care of the teacher and his only opportunity to learn was by watching his teacher teaching others. So the uchideshi practiced looking and listening before anything else. The uchideshi had to "steal" the art, as they said back then. We should watch and listen just as carefully.