Change is Eternal

 

I know you've heard 'You can't step into the same water in a flowing stream twice'. The water you step into this time won't be there the next for it keeps moving on.

Our arts are the same. The record shows everything keeps changing and that is the constant.

You can't keep that from happening.

The islands of Okinawa couldn't stop change. For sake of discussion 100 years ago, say 1908, how many Okinawan's were studying karate? 100? 150? We really don't know because it's not documented, but 100 years ago was before the advent of sharing Karate in the secondary schools began.

As far as I've seen there were no Okinawan karate dojo, no uniforms, no organizations, no rank or titles. Your instructor was likely someone who had been training many decades and had made it hard to train with them. Karate was a non-verbal form of communication with a planned dearth of technical terminiology. If you couldn't say it, you really couldn't give it's secrets away, they came only through long training.

Now jump 100 years and you have maybe 90,000,000 people practicing karate world wide. There are dojo, organizations, uniforms and rank and all the rest.

The idea kata must not change never even worked on Okinawa, they changed continually. The record of the variations on them from instructor to instructor are very plain to see. The only modifying force was the smallness of Okinawa itself, and the press of the other karate adepts against your own performance.

But spread those small, intimate practices world wide, and the lack of smallness and familiarity led directly to a wide open free for all of what karate represnts.

Change is Eternal, don't fight it you can't stop it. But we can try and understand the pressures behind change, try to look at the past more clearly and in turn try to choose wisely which changes our efforts will represent.