On A First Dojo

(Thanks for your patience over the past weekend with my absence and my sincere apologies for the delay in responses - as I have learned, trying to answer anything from beyond the basics on The Computer In My Pocket (TCIMP) is little more than an exercise in mis-spellings and short, bland responses.)

I have often read and seen portrayed in films and books the concept of returning to the dojo that one started at.  The best scene I have seen is, perhaps, from the remake of Thirteen Assassins in 2010, where one of the characters returns to the dojo of his master.  The scene portrays him there, practicing in silence, noticed but not interrupted by his master and teacher, until after training his master enters and asks if he would like a match.  The moment is profound, the student returning after years away implementing the training that he had undertaken there.

That is fiction of course, and fiction can portray whatever it would like without a basis in fact.  What I did not anticipate about returning for this seminar is that I, too, would be confronted by the same sort of reverential feelings.

Oh, I had been back since my move in May, once for last year's seminar and once for a single class when I was back for other reasons.  But those seemed more like continuations of class, not the hard break that had happened with a full move. 

The dojo itself had not really physically changed since my last visit - oh, certainly, a few things had moved around and there were more weapons than before, but the core of it remained the same as the day we moved there (this is the third "location" that the dojo has been in but that is irrelevant; the dojo is where the sensei is and training happens, not a single physical space).   The people, too, had changed:  old faces I recognized, new faces I had met online but not in person.  Suddenly one realizes that one has now become "that student" that is referred to in dojo stories.

But - surprisingly to me - the sense of coming home was palpable.

In the fifteen years I had trained there, I cannot count the hours that I spent in that space training.  It is a meaningless number of course:  even if I could give you a number that does not portray the fullness of what happened there, the hours and hours of repeating and repeating the same actions, the learning of new things, the correction of techniques and overcoming of bad habits.  It does not account for the friendships that developed and the friends that moved on, either to other arts or simply stopping training.

It does not account for the personal learnings that happened there, learnings that continue to serve me to this day.  And it does not account for the personal struggles, the triumphs and repeated failures and occasional overcoming of those failures.

The hours and the place do not account for the fact that the first dojo really is like either the place one grew up all one's life or that one location in a series of locations that sticks out to one as home.

I train here now at a dojo in New Home 3.0.  This is my home dojo, to whose sensei I am bound and where I meet the same challenges, learnings, and (occasional) victories.  And there is an argument that a different dojo and different sensei challenges one in new ways, much as any change can do.  I have no reason or expectation that I will not continue to grow and mature here or that I will not spend many fruitful years here perfecting my art.

And yet - perhaps much like the first place that we have a particular experience or our first love - it will somehow always be different, even thought perhaps only in my emotions.  Because I suspect that, like a first love, one never forgets one's first dojo.