the courage to be
on living fully through it all
One of my favourite shows is the Rehearsal from Nathan Fielder. The premise of the show is to create’s life-like replica’s of settings and scenarios so a person can rehearse difficult life events and conversations before the real thing. They never really go as planned and it’s questionable how the effective the practice really is for these messy, real life, scenarios.
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I used to Judo, a martial art where you throw your opponent and grapple with them. It originated from Japan, for Samurai who couldn’t strike each other because of the tough armour but would inevitably be forced to fight without their swords.
A fundamental part of training in Judo borrowed from kendo. is something called “Uchikomi” or repetition. You rehearse the throw in certain context basically running a crude algorithm over and over again with your partner until it becomes muscle memory. In a real fight, you would have a felt sense and pattern matching to execute the throw in a specific context. I imagine high-level Judo is played sort of like a chess engine where you’re constantly trying to make the other person glitch off-balance and feint a reaction to a move to throw them. However, some Judo teachers/sensei dislike Uchikomi practice because you’re only practicing like 80% of the throw and stopping at the last second to spare your training partner the pain of being thrown 100 times. You might be training yourself to execute most of the throw but freeze or glitch on the last-mile execution costing you the game. May be the best practice is just good ol’ fashioned sparring with a resisting partner.
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All of this to say, I get the tendency breaking complex, hairy situations into atomic, predictable pieces for deep practice. It’s especially useful for beginners who cannot keep track of all the moving parts that make up a nuanced task. But there’s a deeper anxiety in all this which makes things like stoicism popular and the show Rehearsal so funny. This anxiety stems from living in times of incredible change and flux. By wanting to create abstract and simplified systems in which one can practice with lower stakes.
This is sometimes referred to as agency. This is someone who just does stuff. This is someone who is able to traverse uncertainty and insecurity and do things anyway.
That’s one way to live. It is to live life without rehearsal. Just to break things into tiny little fragments and do them for real, no matter how poorly at first and feeling secure enough mentally and physically (in terms of resources) to be able to do this. I understand not everyone can all the time. However, I think everyone has the capacity for it.. To sit with each situation anew, approach it with a beginners mind, and be able to surf the uncertainty as it comes.
This essay was inspired by Pema Chodron’s writings, The Rehearsal and Quarantine Collective’s series on Stoicism.