This month in my many travels, I had occasion to discuss Aikido as it relates to horse-riding (albeit superficially) with a friend. Aikido is a defensive marshal art in which the person defending him/herself channels the energy of the aggressor in a circular flow/movement to diffuse a negative situation. Applied to horse-riding it translates to "don’t fight with a 480kg beast because you won’t win the battle but listen and go with the movement to modify the outcome".
I considered my own circumstances – it’s been one of those "why me" months; why do I keep going round in circles. I remembered that in my March newsletter I referred to line from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets "We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time ". The same poem, in an earlier verse says "What we call the beginning is often the end, And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from".
It occurred to me I may have been missing the point. How often does it happen to you that your life, through a series of coincidences keeps reinforcing something you just didn’t, wouldn’t or couldn’t hear. Mine is trying to remind me of the magic of the circle. The circle symbolises the infinite and flowing nature of energy and in alchemy is a centre point of focus. In other words nothing starts or ends it merely changes. Almost always when we stop fighting whatever it is that is worrying us and stop trying to move against the flow (upstream so to speak) it comes together. And almost always, when we lose our centre and our focus, the wheels fall off. So to quote my horsey friend, who was quoting a friend, who was quoting a friend, who was quoting …… "keep a leg on each side and your mind in the middle".