To Blog of Not To Blog. That is the question.

 

 

When Mario McKenna suggested I start a blog, I thought about just what that would be and developed some guidelines for it.

 

1.      What I was most interested in was preserving what I tried to share with my students for them to have to use as they wished. There were so many things over the years that I wanted to remind them of.

2.      I also did not expect that others who were not my students would make an effort to try and understand what I was to write. But I truly believe information does not need to be hidden so I permitted anyone who wanted to to see what I wrote. If anyone underwent the effort to learn from what wrote, by their effort they deserved it.

3.      I did not structure this to be a book on purpose. Life does not follow a straight narrative after all, it just happens. And remembering that as things struck me they would be written in that order.

4.      Of course there was knowledge I preferred to privately share with my students. To that end I shared other knowledge directly with them, again for them to use on not.

5.      Over my decades I accomplished ever so much more that I had time for in class, which was always foused first and foremost on my student’s needs. This allowed me to share a portion of my other studies, efforts etc. For their use or perhaps for their future students.

6.      I noticed that as time went on, more individuals were visiting my blog. But it also was very much a one way street, almost no one ever contacted me about what I wrote. That was fine with me, so I learned that when I posted but did not share I posted something, almost no one noticed.

 

When I think about Okinawan karate how very little was ever written about the arts and oral transmission remained the most coherent way information was transferred to the student, I realized how little changed as time passed.

 

Of course today we have the internet, youtube, facebook and all the rest. But for the most part very little is really being shared. Which is why the same discussions occur over and over again. More is being shared than ever before, but also as little as there ever was.

 

I do not consider myself a great authority on anything but what I actually did. But this modest effort in which I have engaged, seems much larger simply because no one else seems to be doing so in any detail.

 

There are so many stories of what instructors, in the past and today, experienced. And they are not being shared. I am not questioning instructors right to share with their students in their own ways. But honestly I don’t find anyone who is making a serious attempt to preserve what they have experienced.

 

And what is not saved and shared, we cannot learn from. It is their right not to share it with us, or choose what they want to share, after all. But so much, nigh unto an infinity of history is continually being lost to us to be able to learn from

 

Perhaps I missed the meeting where it was explained  ‘Thou shall Not Share’.

 

 

I am not suggesting anyone has to do anything. Just observing what is not shared could answer so many questions.

 

 

Well I will do what I do, others will do what they do.

 

This is reality Mr. Jones, (borrowed and changed from an old Irving Berlin song).