Focused Falling

This morning I headed out for another run which I am trying to do each and every morning. 

 As the path I take is often the same one I walk the dog with, I decided to take a different direction on the same route- reverse, to change things up. I headed out of the street and crossed over to the continuation of it. 

 The morning was warm and my mind was regaling my soul with the plans for the upcoming day and meetings that were to occur. Suddenly, I was reeling, my mind completely blank. Apparently I had misstepped. I was now off balance, not the normal thud thud mode of a runner with a steady gait but the thu-thud thu-thud of someone off balance looking for a place to fall. All I could see was the concrete and blacktop; all I could feel was the scraping sound my hand would make and the pain when I went down. And then I saw them: the medians. Swaths of dirt next to the street, between the driveways. Still staggering off balance, my feet striking the pattern of a man ready to collapse, I bent all my energies towards hitting one of those dirt patches with the dormant brown grass. I have not been more focused in recent history than I was in that moment as I tried to aim myself, a human missile desperately trying to avoid everything around me except one point. 

 And then I went down.  To the swath of brown earth and brown grass. 

 I sat there for a moment, not believing my fortune (or blessing) in having reached that point. I felt for pain; my hands were untorn except for dirt, my clothes unripped, my knee unscraped. I slowly got to my feet, pulling pine needles and leaves out of my underwear where the sweatpants had gone down and brushing off the dirt on my skin. Taking stock, I caught my breath and tried to head on (which, as it turns out, didn't work. No twisted ankles but my left hip was a bit stretched. An undignified limp home). 

 As I slowly worked my way around the corner occasionally pulling out a pine needle, I suddenly caught the irony of the situation: right before I fell, I was thinking about focus and strategy and intensity. Suddenly all of that was thrust aside for a moment when I really needed focus and strategy and intensity. Could it be that part of the reason we fail to achieve our dreams and goals so often is that we don't focus on them as we should? 

 Certainly we claim we do: we think, we write, we attend classes, we meet with others about what we will do, we even speak of the things we will do. But do we focus on them with the desperation of a man avoiding falling everywhere except one place. 

 Last year at the seminar, our soke told us one of the keys to Iaido is to always practice with a sense of desperation, a sense of reality. "Always act as if there was a real opponent there" he said. "Desperation will add to the intensity of the practice." I heard that, and believed it - but until this morning at 0435, I don't think I ever really understood it: the desperation and focus that removes all other things from your mind, leaving only one objective that you desperately need to accomplish, that you are straining towards even as your body careens out of control and you can taste the pain of failure as it looms up as each step pounds the ground, your center of balance far forward of where it should be.

 It can be a simple as a brown patch of earth to cushion your body. It can be as complex as completely changing a life. The focus and intensity remain the same.