On practice and the new year

Before I begin, I just need to say I hate the new WordPress text editor and need to figure out how to revert. This is infuriating.

Anyway. Back when I was in New York, practicing iaido, every new year of practice we’d rededicate ourselves to our studies by performing a thousand cuts. I can’t entirely remember if we only did one kind of cut, but these days, I have to vary it up. That said, the cuts aren’t the meat of the matter of this post.

A significant part of my Destreza practice is reading and translation. There’s painfully little original LVD material available in English, and I’m one of the handful of people well placed to solve it. So here’s a variation on the thousand cuts, and symbolic rededication to my practice.

I’ve been working on the off-hand section of Figueiredo’s Oplosophia for a few years now, very intermittently. So here’s my 2020 new year’s promise to you: On New Year’s Eve (today) and New Year’s Day, I’ll be working on getting all of the off-hand weapon section translated and (eventually) available to the public.

But — there are a few caveats.

  1. It’s a rough translation. There may be errors in there, but I’ve footnoted the living daylights out of this document so you know why I made my decisions and can help ferret out where I went wrong, or where I went right.
  2. It’s a rough draft. I’ll do my best to make the English nice and clean, but my concern is getting the work done, not polishing. Polishing is a separate task requiring a slightly different skill deployment. Maybe I’ll get around to that at some point in the future. I do have other projects that are also in progress.
  3. This is a free work (Creative Commons 4.0). You’re free to share, remix, add. Just please credit the work I’ve done.
  4. You will probably not see the full document by New Year’s Day. But I do live at the vanguard of the international date line, so my January 2 may very well be your January 1. The document should be out by the middle of January the latest depending on day job workloads.

So, there you have it. Some solid new year’s rededication practice that promises to bring you wonderful goodies, too. Hey! Now that I think of it, maybe I should set a January 6 deadline — it’s Three Kings Day, and the end of the twelve days of Christmas. Better than a bunch of nuts and sweets in your shoe, but only just.

In the meantime, I hope folks are having a good holiday season. I know for many of us it’s not easy at all for all sorts of reasons. If that’s the case, be kind to yourselves and seek out the company of people who cherish and celebrate you, even if it’s via electronic means.

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