It was one of those nights where after the keiko is over, I sat down and tell myself for maybe the hundredth time: you can really tell a person's character when you train with him/her.
Granted, we all have limitations as human beings. Therefore we aspire to continually improve ourselves in whatever we do. There are some who try, improve and grow. Some try, but don't seem to be getting anywhere. Yet some try, but are not really opening their eyes and minds to what is being taught in front of them. In some cases some are contented with where they are and what they are doing, ready to spend the rest of their lives at status quo.
Given the short time that I am going to be in Japan, I try to attend the classes of as many shihans and shidoins as I can. I want to see how they express themselves through aikido and also to get to know abit more about them through their practice.
One night I was fortunate to have dinner with some of the teachers and invariably the conversation turned to aikido as one sensei was concerned with how I was doing in my aikido practice so far. One of the things I told him was that it is very different compared to home as back there there were some restrictions with body contact and also the number of partners you can train with. However, after coming to Japan I have so many partners to choose from and there were no problems with body contact. Sensei responded with one sentence; " You have to choose you partner carefully." That statement came back to bite me one day.
One of those nights, I partnered with someone I thought would have somewhat changed after training daily at Hombu Dojo for so many months. My first experience with X was a rather unpleasant one. X was stiff and did X's own aikido contrary to what was taught by the shihan. After 5-6 months, I partnered with X again and it was the same. I am not saying that I am a fabulous aikido practitioner, but at the very least I try my best to do what is being taught by the sensei that is taking the class, not whatever I am comfortable with. I felt that it was waste of my time because I intended to practice what as taught, not what X thinks how it should be done. In fact sensei came over a few times to train with X but X could not follow because X did not ensure that connection was kept for as long as possible. In the end, sensei stopped, smile and walked away without completing the technique.
It was a less than fun session but I made the choice to train with X and now I know one thing for sure; I will not choose X to train with in future, due to the reasons above.
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