New Lamps for Old

The thing you have to love about Maha Guru Plinck is that he's always looking for a better, more efficient way to do things. He studies this and that, he contemplates something that's been knocking around in his head for a while, and when it gets ripe, he brings it out.


Here, he says. Have a look at this ...


As your circles get smaller, what you teach tends to get more precise. Small adjustments here and there make a difference. Not changing any basic principles, but a little fine tuning on position or stance or timing, and bap! all of a sudden, it's as if you've over-sharped a lens. Yesterday, you had 20/20 vision and that was the norm and good, but today, that focus tightens just a bit, and of a moment, you are at 20/10, and you can see more clearly.


Some of this has to do with his own study. Some of it has to do with the students being ready to see something they might not have been ready to see before; or, not really being able to integrate it. 


Could he show this new trick to beginners? Sure. Would they appreciate it as much? I don't think so. 


There are plenty of people who will argue that if you can't get the meat of an art down in a year or two, then you're wasting your time; that all the extra training after that is superfluous. I think you can say that about basic principles. Basics need to be simple. But as a lot of folks have said over a lot of years, "simple" does not equal "easy."


A couple of years of diligent study and you'd have the basics of our art, the key word here being "diligent." But to get to the dialed-in-smooth, don't-have-to-think-about-it kind of mastery, we head toward that ten-thousand hour thing, while it doesn't take that long to make it useful, the world-class player is not the same as the good-enough-to-get-by player.


I won't live long enough to get there, but I'd rather shoot for world-class than not. 


All of which is to say, that there was a new toy with which to play at the most recent class. Not a major, omigawd! movement, just a little adjustment–and if I say it had to do with the basics, that's not much help, but that's what it was–that makes a noticeable difference.


Was what we were doing before wrong? No, it worked just fine. 20/20 vision, you don't need glasses.


20/10?  You can see better. 


Simple thing. But not necessarily easy. There'll be some adjustments in how we do things, and in the short run, that will require thinking about it. After a time, once it is dialed in? It will be better. 


One of the things about being in this art for a while is that I can see that, and could feel it right away. 

And we just keeeep on truckin' ...