I’d blame it on dirt-plain
mathematics, that whit of tremor inflicted on the load-bearing wall-post, which
can absorb both lateral and vertical stresses without a flinch— a foot thick of
poured concrete with reinforcing steel bars can. How could a pair of stomping
front kicks even rattle that reinforced solid wall?
Uh, mathematics tells me that at a wee
one percent daily increment, any given amount doubles itself in 70 days. I’ve
been hurling out those kicks for ages, in a vain try to splice steel into the
inner thighs and the lower leg muscles. That daily regimen wasn’t adding and
compounding a daily one percent to the kicking power—give or take a tenth of
the percentage it takes to double the baseline amount every 70 days, I must
have been doing at less than half of 1%.
I’m afraid I’m just doing through the
motions when I do the daily hand drills—trapping hands, crippling hands, Demon
Hand— at the stand of bamboos rising at the southeast section of our
forest-garden home. Same intent: splice a string or two of steel in the
forearms and upper arms as such hurled out force of speed is absorbed in and
lends blithe, lithe movements arising from the body core. But, I took my own
sweet time. No hurries, no worries. Lahat
ay madali kapag hindi nagmamadali. Ay, ‘twas
that demon Mephistopheles who inspired the not-too-ponderous Demon Hand after
he was rebuked by Faustus the Magus that thought flies faster than the 3,000
feet/second speed of light.
Math abides in culprit calculations:
any sum or quantity-- such as money, speed, strength capacity or mass—increased
at a paltry 1% daily doubles itself in 70 days. All it takes is patience,
patience, and more patience; somehow the body can save and amass gargantuan
amounts of muscle memory one day at a time.
Body aside, raising the mind to a
higher level involves another set of numbers. And anyone in that level-up
attempt needs to grasp what mind really is. Or as St. Augustine of Hippo avers:
“Eo mens est imago Dei, quo capax Dei est et particeps esse potest. (The mind
is the image of God, in that it is capable of Him and can be partaker of Him.)”
It took a 40-day fast in the desert
wilderness for the Son of Man to get to the threshold of a mind-expanding
experience; the Devil turned up and offered Him lots and lots of whatever the
heart desires, but He declined and rebuked every temptation that lesser mortals
would mindlessly grab at, no qualms.
Practitioners of the arcane arts go
through the same 40-day preparation, bundling up the mind’s hideous or heinous
powers with total focusing before such are unleashed on the unwitting or
unwary.
Both O-Sensei Morihei Ueshiba, aikido
progenitor, and war strategist Sun Tzu agree that every engagement, every
battle begins in the mind, or as St. Augustine would have it, in the very image
of God.
Not too many blokes these days can go
through 40 days of mind focusing, why, even millennials were found to have an
average seven-second attention span, mwa-ha-ha-ha-haw!
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