The Art of Peace is not easy. It is a fight to the finish, the slaying of evil desires and all falsehood within. On occasion the Voice of Peace resounds like thunder, jolting human beings out of their stupor.
Morihei Ueshiba, The Art of Peace
It is the thunderbolt that steers the course of all things.
Heraclitus, fragment B64 (R.P. 1898)
There is something very interesting and quite similar going on with the concept of time in aikido and rhetoric. Both take place not in the past or the future, but now. And this now is not frozen; it flows.
Aikido and rhetoric use several metaphors to help practitioners understand this insight: here O-sensei and Heraclitus use the thunderbolt. The easiest gateway to the teaching here is probably from the rhetoric side, in the difference the Greeks marked between two kinds of time: chronos, metrical time, segmented by clocks into homogenous, serial pieces and strung together in a line pointing from the past toward the future; and kairos, opportunistic time, the time of meeting, the time of change; an opening; a circle.
Another way of putting the difference: Chronos is unconscious time; kairos is conscious time. Chronos is time happening when we’re asleep to it. In kairos something happens to make us suddenly aware of time; we wake up. Athletes experience this paradox of freezing to flow when they feel time slow down as they pass a soccer ball through a split-second opening between players’ legs, for instance. Rhetoricians experience it when they sense that the world is changing with what is being said, or that everything depends on what is said next; an aikidoka experiences it when they connect with their partner to the point where the practice is no longer a matter of anticipating the partner’s next move, but becomes the joint creation of movement in a now that lasts exactly as long as it needs to.
In these moments, we wake up. We interface. We understand, not in the sense of evaluation or reflection, but in the literal sense: we stand under the thunderbolt that is lighting everything up, including us.
The Rookery 