"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."
- Martin Luther
I stumbled across this quote today. Because I see my world through the lens of martial arts, the words of this 16th century German theologian brought me back to Japanese kata. (What would Luther think of that, I wonder!?)
But he captures it perfectly. He plants an apple tree because it is good to plant an apple tree. It isn’t about getting something. It isn’t about seeing the tree grow or eating the fruit. Just planting the tree itself is a good thing to do today. Nothing else is required.
If we practice any art only to get somewhere else, our practice will never have the maturity or focus necessary to grow. We can’t guess, when we plant that tree, whether it will be a giant tree or die in a drought or be consumed by a fire. We can’t look at the seed and somehow determine the outcome. All we can do is prepare the soil and plant today.
When we do our kata in karate, we simply do our kata. If it is worth doing, then do it. The result is what happens right now, not a prize you get in twenty years. If the world ended tomorrow, would you still do kata today? Someday, your world will end. It will come sooner than you’d like. On that day, will you be glad you spent all that time waving your hands in the air?
If you expect there will be some kind of reward or culmination or mountaintop experience, you should stop training. If you expect no reward to come from this at all, then you have the correct attitude. We don’t train to get something. We train because it is good to train. It’s fun. It brings joy. It makes me a better person and, ultimately, more at ease in the thought of facing my own impermanence.
I train because I can’t not train.
Plant your apple tree and practice your kata with no thought for the morrow. Do good with no hope for a certain outcome. We can’t make the world respond a certain way, but we can take the next step in our practice. We can plant this seed. We can be kind in this moment. “Just this,” says the Zen sage. The whole universe is right here, in this apple seed.
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