Warrior’s Live Every Moment

Kempo Karate with Uchiyama quote“Live every moment with all your energy. Don’t stop, keep going, steadily – that is life.”

 – Shigeru Uchiyama

I agree with Dai-Hanshi Shigerun Uchiyama when he said we must live every moment. That is living with the Warrior’s Edge. He said that when he was 84 years old, and also said, “You have to work hard to the very end of the day – that is what makes life worth living, what brings you happiness. I may die tomorrow. If I work hard until the very end of my days, that’s a good life.”

Uchiyama strove go give the utmost effort each and every day, and he felt very fortunate to encounter Shorinji Kempo because it taught him how to live. I believe many of us, if not all of us, who train in martial arts feel this way. This gets to one of the most important parts of discovering your warrior’s edge and living life to the fullest. When I speak about living with the Warrior’s Edge, I’m talking about the edge in life you get through training your body, mind, and spirit the warrior way. I’m talking about taking those lessons from the martial arts and warriorship and applying them to your entire life to give you the edge over those who don’t train and forge themselves through the disciplined hard work and ideals that warriors adhere to and live by.

Uchiyama studied judo as a young boy and later taught judo to various police forces. In 1952, he encountered a demonstration of Shorinji Kempo and immediately began to study the system with its founder, Doshin So. Uchiyama believed that if he had lived only for himself, he would have never made the progress he did, and that the idea of mutual improvement came first and thanks to that teaching he had a very happy life.

I like this idea in training. The idea of improving yourself and your partner simultaneously. The idea it to build up your body and spirit together with your partner. If we embraced this concept in the training hall, we would not only improve ourselves, but ensure that those we train with also improve. When we live with the warrior’s edge, we take this principle out of the training hall and also apply it to other areas of our lives. We live every moment with all our energy and we help others do the same. We improver ourselves and others simultaneously.

I believe this to be a very powerful concept, though not the easiest to actually incorporate into our busy competitive lives. But if we do, we can find a sense of accomplishment and pride that we improved ourselves and helped others improve themselves to contribute to the world. We can then appreciate what we’ve done and know that we’ve lived a life worth living. A life were we lived every moment with purpose.

 

I learned about Shigerun Uchiyama and his teachings from The Warrior’s Path: Wisdom from Contemporary Martial Arts Masters edited by James Sidney:

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