Pay Attention

In what has become a recurring theme in my life as of late, my health has been compromised with a shoulder injury. I will need rotator cuff surgery to repair the damage that I incurred at my job this past October and I've been home since. Last year I had a full shoulder replacement on my left side; this time it's my right shoulder.  I'm still waiting for the so-called "Golden Years" to kick in. I really thought my golden time was in the bag; after all, I've taken care of myself my entire adult life, and I assumed my eventual physical decline would be a protracted soft landing. A recent blog post from a karate practitioner, however, puts it succintly:

The decline is not slow and incremental.

Recent research seems to suggest that it’s not a slow ticking clock that causes physical decline but actually, across the sexes there are two significant spikes in dramatic decline. One occurs in the mid 40’s; scientists knew this but initially thought that statistics were skewed by the menopause in woman in that age group—but no… men have identical declines.

The other spike is in the early 60’s. A Japanese Wado teacher warned me of this, “You wait till you hit the 60’s barrier” he cheerfully told me.

So that’s the bad news, but it’s better to be warned ahead of time than to live in ignorance and then be blindsided by it.

I was telling a co-worker that the good news for me is that I'm running out of things to break on my body. I'm starting to acquire the same number of artificial repairs and prosthetic joints as RoboCop, the cyborg law enforcer from the 80s movie of the same name. In a couple of years I plan to retire. Hopefully I can manage to work the remaining time without crippling myself every six months.
 

For now there's not much I can do. Two of my current pastimes are reading and meditating, the latter being long associated with the martial arts. Meditation is a practice that is simple yet deceptively difficult. The idea of sitting absolutely still while quieting the mind is antithetical in our culture. The goal is the elimation of thoughts by simply paying attention to them. Through this act of mindfulness, the cessation of mind-chatter becomes attainable. That's it. In cultivating this practice one can achieve a number of psychological and physical benefits that are so well documented I won't delve into it here.

 

Shoshin Nagamine, the famous founder of Matsubayahshi-ryu karate, became deeply drawn to Zen and meditation in his senior years. As a result, he achieved Satori (enlightenment) at the age of 62 and lived for another twenty-eight years, time that was well spent in his administration of karate on Okinawa and the rest of the world.

I'm not up to taking on the world, I just want to make it to my retirement in one piece. My wife has been telling me to "be more careful" when I'm working. Yes, we all need to be attentive in our daily lives, especially at the job. Pay attention! In my defense, sometimes certain events at work are unavoidable. 

 

Somewhere I read one pithy definition of meditation that stuck with me: "Paying attention to paying attention." This reminds me of a Zen parable:

The day before going off to war,  a soldier sought the counsel of the Zen master Ikkyu. "Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom? I need some insight that will guide me and allow me to prevail on the battlefield."

Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word: "Attention."

"Is that all?" asked the soldier. "Will you not add something more ?"

Ikkyu then wrote twice: "Attention. Attention."

"Well," remarked the soldier rather irritably, "I really don't see much depth or subtlety in what you have just written."

Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three times: "Attention. Attention. Attention."

Half-angered, the soldier demanded, "What does that word 'attention' mean anyway?"

Ikkyu answered gently, "Attention means attention."