The sad outcome of “McDojos”

You know what a “message in a bottle” is, right?!
Well, in case you don’t, it is the desperate act of a person who finds himself marooned on an island all alone, with no means of escaping it…
So, he writes a note on a piece of paper with his present coordinates (if he knows them!), puts the note into a bottle (if he has one!), seals it off (if he can!) and then throws it into the sea, in the hope that someday, someone might find it and come to his rescue…
And you know what? Impossible as it may sound, on occasion this method has actually worked. Surely not as often as it has been tried, but it has worked.

So, today, I will do something similar with this text…
It will be my own “message in a bottle”.
I will send it “out there” in a sea of nothingness, in the hope that maybe someday, someone, will find it.
But there is a twist!
This will not serve the purpose of sending the finder to my rescue, but the other way round. It will lead the finder to his own rescue!
The sole intention here is to spare an Aikido newcomer, even if it is just one, from boarding the wrong boat…

Ingredients gone sour
It is well known by now, that referring to a Dojo as McDojo, means that “the food being served there is bad”, with all that this innuendo can imply.
I have never used that term myself, because through time I spontaneously came up with my own instead…
I refer to them as “Dojo light!”
Why?! Well… because there is a double meaning behind it.

Firstly, a Dojo is supposed to also be a place of achieving enlightenment…
So, here I cannot help being sarcastic…
And secondly, the term light is also used for “thinned out food”, like when we say mayonnaise-light! And here, unavoidably I am being nasty…
But it truly cannot be otherwise, one can simply not help it in being so.

Personally, McDojos do not concern me in any way, they never did. They do what they do and if people cannot see, or refuse to see, what is “served” there, I will spend no time about the matter. Not even for small talk of convincing anybody into anything else. I am a busy man with my own affairs…

There is only one thing that would catch my attention, and that is young at age students, who have a dream of learning… Simply that!
And it is an undeniable fact, that McDojos are the graveyard of dreams!
To give an example: A young person in his teens has this dream of learning Aikido in order to defend himself, but this usually goes hand-in-hand with the desire to “become” a person they are not, yet!
Please note that there is no “master plan” at such an age and such thinking, and most of the time these kinds of desires remain untold. But one has to be blind in order to miss the shine in the eyes…
So, he enters a McDojo in order to start practicing, and between the distance of a few weeks or months, McDojo’s nutrition will poison this dream and drive it into oblivion… Sooner or later, the youngling will abandon his practice and might not even remember why he originally started.
All this works fine for a McDojo, because it feeds itself with new admissions, and shall I add, lost dreams! And nobody really cares, since the great number of abandonment leaves room for more new admissions…

The funny thing is that there is an army of people who feel comfortable practicing at McDojos, on a permanent base, and they seem to fit perfectly there…
You see, they feed their illusions as “light” as it comes to them. Please take a moment in order to let this last line sink in!
For them, the sentence “betraying their dreams” is not even valid, because they absolutely had none in the first place…
Let me explain! He who dreams of learning has no ego. Not because he has none, but because his dream exceeds his ego.
For those of you already practicing… It is as if you are fighting to protect someone else than yourself. Then you really become a lion!

I admire many things which lie in the past, but I am not a “good old times” person… Realistically speaking McDojos always existed, but they have not been the majority in the past. And since they have become the majority nowadays, most people do react by going with the flow of it all, by thinking that a McDojo is “the place to be”.

Way back in time, when in a conversation it came up that I practice Aikido, nine out of ten people would immediately ask me that one  single question: “Can you please show me?!”. And I did…
And by the way, it brings a smile to my face when I remember the incredible places where “showing Aikido” took place, and how people reacted by this experience!
Nowadays, when it comes up in a conversation that I practice Aikido, nine out of ten people start “teaching me” what it is they saw on YouTube and ask me things which could not be more irrelevant and “out of space”…

Maybe it is time to put things in the right perspective! Whenever I will meet someone interesting enough for me to train, I will do the “Let me show you something!” maneuver. Before he/she will have time to react… I have done that before and it works!

Castaways
After all the “fine work” which is done by a McDojo on students, how many of them will clutch their teeth, move on, and make the effort to look for a Dojo which will fill the term? Very few, if any, because now the dream is spoiled and nothing is left anymore, only disappointment!

Last but not least… Do you remember the message in the bottle I was telling you about at the beginning of this?! Let us open it and see what was written in it… I know it is naughty to do so, but it’s alright, this is not for real since we are in a text!

“Your dreams will be the wind on your back…
But you need to start building a ship”

October 7, 2016