Aikido and Rhetoric: Where to from here?

One does not need buildings, money, power, or status to practice the Art of Peace (aikido). Heaven is right where you are standing, and that is the place to train.

Morihei Ueshiba, The Art of Peace

Most are at odds with that with which they most constantly associate — the account which governs the universe — and … what they meet with every day seems foreign to them.

Heraclitus, fragment 72 (Barnes)

One of the major differences between philosophy and rhetoric is that while philosophy concerns itself with what is always absent (truth, ideals), rhetoric concerns itself with what is always present, kairos, the situation on the ground. It’s easy to get caught up in what we want and don’t have, where we aren’t and want to be, what should be the case and isn’t. In reply, rhetoric and aikido both ask us: “Where to from here?” We may not be where we want to be, but the only way to get there is to start from here, where we are standing. Lucky for us, as both Heraclitus and O-Sensei remind us, we are standing at the fulcrum of the universe.