Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)
“Tradition is Tending the Flame. It is NOT Worshiping the Ashes.” Humans have and rely on memory to live and survive and it is well studied, documented and not well known that humans upon retrieving memories change those memories according to the moment along with past experiences, etc.
Yes, I am saying that our memories are not written in stone nor are they as exacting or exact as we believe. Our memories every time are tweaked accordingly, in the moment and to support our belief systems, etc. Even if we want to hold on to a tradition as an unchanging thing our human species naturally changes the very thing we wish to hold on to and label as tradition or traditional.
In all things but especially in karate and martial arts we think of traditional as something to maintain in an unchanging form even to the reasoning of “To Honor and Remember our Founder.” This strict adherence to past precedence is very common especially in some martial/karate circles excluding any possible change.
In can best be said that those who we lean to worship as great persons all achieved that level of respect and admiration because they were innovators, creators and developers of the very system or style of discipline that is labeled as traditions or traditional. They took the traditions they received, they analyzed those traditions, they developed appropriate changes for the times in which they lived and then they synthesized new traditions to pass along. They demonstrated that one cannot just accept things the way they are but they understood that one must take those traditions and still move forward, to allow that very same tradition to evolve.
Study history, study the ways of the past - traditions, remember and hold them in your heart but remember that spending too much time and energy on the past slowly kills it and takes it very vitality as an art and way, stagnating its potential and creativity. Build your way with a foundation of history and traditions. Don’t focus exclusively on the past and its past ways for that is to stifle and stagnate any possible future.
Traditions are about fanning and fueling the flames of learning, understanding, creating creatively and then analyzing and synthesizing new traditions firmly connected to the old making all traditions fluid, changing and evolving for each time, each moment and each individual.
Respect the Old; Respect the Past; Learn from Traditions and Create the New; Create from the Past; Synthesize New Traditions!
Bibliography (Click the link)
“In order for any life to matter, we all have to matter.” - Marcus Luttrell, Navy Seal (ret)
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