Lend Me Your Arm

I walked out of the house to find my husband in the backyard. He was mowing the lawn. I motioned for him to stop the lawn tractor. Tom stopped mowing the lawn and walked over to where I was standing.

I made a request, “Lend me your arm”.

For the next fifteen minutes, my husband and I worked on a portion of bunkai that was stuck in my brain. We were in the middle of our backyard. A few cars passed by…slowly. I wonder what they were thinking. We live in an old town. A plaque at the end of the street recognizes the pioneer family who founded the town. We moved there in 1995 but we are still the new people in town. Some residents’ families lived there for generations. I think they are just getting used to our karate school inhabiting the old restaurant/bar.

I walked back to the dojo.

My husband is excellent at bunkai. I tell him he has a “bunkai brain”. I wonder why some people can “see” things so clearly while others, like myself, need to work at it. I think his engineering background and his AutoCAD skills help his bunkai. A short aside: Years ago, as a joke, a class asked Tom to bunkai the Macarena. He did…successfully.

Currently, I am trying to work through a couple pieces of bunkai. It is hard to work through things without a partner. Visualization can only go so far. Some of the bunkai works marvelously in my brain but is simply awful when I try it with a partner.

There is only one way to find out if something works...

My husband will have to “Lend me his arm”.