What I learned from my few years of Aikido has helped me to understand many things, for what it teaches applies to most activities, both physical and mental. The one key lesson is that the ideal state is one where you are both utterly relaxed and utterly concentrated. This is a notion which is alien to most of us in the West, who tend to think of relaxation and concentration as opposed states. Yet we have all of us experienced moments when this was, in fact, not so, when the two did co-exist in a fruitful balance. Certainly this was what happened when I was running and swimming well and what now happens when I am writing well. But in our culture concentration implies stiffness, tension, all sorts of energies repressed or kept at bay, while relaxation means just the opposite: slackness, letting go, doing nothing. Virgil and Milton are the great poets of this opposition. For them to relax is to give in to temptation and what is important is to be constantly vigilant. Milton's heroine in Comus prefers to turn into stone rather than succumb to the seduction of the nature spirit, and Milton's very style suggests a huge effort of the will, an imposition of order on a dangerously unruly language. The power of his writing makes this opposition almost believable, but my own experiences of swimming, of Aikido and of writing convince me that the antithesis he develops is a false one. There is nothing esoteric about the famed nonchalance of the Zen archer or what our Aikido teacher tried to instil into us, but, like all such things, it is a simple lesson which is extremely hard to learn.
In Egypt, when I was a child, we used to train every afternoon from May to September in the open-air pool next to the football field. Dotted through the season were a number of competitions, divided into age groups from under twelve to under sixteen. At times training seemed wearisome and repetitious. At times it felt as though one was going backwards in terms of both technique and speed. But if one had put in the right kind of training and the right amount of it, and if the coach had got his timing right and one peaked for the most important competitions, then the actual races were wonderful occasions, even though one invariably felt terrible beforehand.
The key here too was to stay relaxed while concentrating totally. If you tightened up you were done for, and yet a lapse of concentration at the start or the turn or in the final few strokes would ruin the work of months of hard training.
In swimming one is using one's whole body: the arms pull and it is vital to keep the strokes as long and relaxed as possible; the legs beat, the kick starting in the region of the abdomen and going down through the thighs and calves to the ankles in a whiplash action; and breathing has to stay as measured as possible. The faster one goes the higher up in the water the body rises and the easier it is on the arms, back and chest and so, of course, on the breathing. Yet the faster one goes the more energy one is using up and thus the harder it is to breathe and the greater the pain felt by the body.
When everything clicks, as it did for me in one memorable race, you no longer feel yourself as made up of arms, legs, torso, neck and head. Instead you are a single living entity, a centre of energy without any definable outline. You are moving fast and your heart is pounding, not so much with the effort as with the excitement; in spite of this you feel the power you are generating as you churn through the water and feel too that you are staying beautifully relaxed. For this timeless moment body and mind are one in the effort being made and the satisfaction achieved.
It was the final of a national one-hundred-metres free-style race. My problem was that I always tended to start off a little too slowly, afraid that I would not have anything left in the last twenty metres. But I had registered only the third fastest time in the heats and I knew that if I was to give myself a chance of winning I would have to take a risk with the finish and start off as though it were a fifty-metre sprint. At the turn (the championships were held in an Olympic-sized pool in the open air) I could sense that I was fractionally ahead of my two rivals, and wondered if I had set off too fast this time and would now start to pay the penalty. But I took the turn well and kicked down the second length as I had done so many times in training, knowing that it was now just a matter of keeping my form till the finish. I could see the dim shape of my nearest rival alongside me in the water and sensed that he was making up ground. But at seventy metres I knew I was still marginally ahead. This was when suddenly everything started to hurt. But this was also where the hours and hours of training started to pay off. I had been in this sort of pain before and knew I could go on without tightening up, keeping the leg-beat deep and the breathing regular. I could see the crowds on the side of the pool every time I turned my head to breathe and could sense, rather than hear, the shouts. I knew my rivals hadn't actually got past me, but whether I was still ahead of them or not was impossible to determine. Then the dark mass of the end of the pool loomed ahead and it was just a question of digging down into the last reserves, not taking breath for those final few strokes even though my lungs felt as though they were about to explode, and hoping that I would touch the wall at the end of my stroke and not have to glide in or take an extra short stroke.
Afterwards it is several minutes before anyone knows the result. All one wants to do is breathe, calm the terrible pounding of the heart, the heaving of the chest. Then one is aware that the time-keepers and judges are in deep conversation. At least, I thought, it was close, at least I gave them a better race than the last time. With luck I may have improved my own time for the distance and one can't ask for more than that. Except that one can and does. However good the time, there is no substitute for winning.
But why should that be? Surely, one might think, swimming well, swimming to the best of one's ability, feeling the body alive, at ease with itself, is reward enough. At such times, after all, one is at the opposite pole from the prisoner in solitary confinement, from the ambiguous pleasures of addiction and perversity. At such times it seems that if the body has any destiny it is this. And yet, however much I might comfort myself by saying that I had, after all, set a personal best time, that I had simply been beaten by the better man, to have come so close and not won would have been a bitter disappointment. Of course to win when one has not swum particularly well, to win because one's opponents were themselves not on form, is not particularly satisfying either. But there is no doubt that the months of training and sacrifice only seem to pay off fully if one wins. Is it because to be beaten suggests that one is psychologically not up to the challenge, even though one may be physically well prepared? I don't know. All I know is that swimming or running faster than one has ever done before and winning is the ultimate satisfaction for any athlete. Then it becomes a pleasure to look back over the race and remember how it unfolded, how one felt at every moment, and what, in retrospect, were the turning-points. Then one recalls the bare minute it took for the race to unfold as a minute when one had somehow spoken and said all one had ever wanted to say. The pleasure that brings with it stays with one for ever, even though at the time it passes quickly and one returns to preparing for the next race.
21 Walker and World
To walk in intense heat with not a breath of air stirring requires a steeling of the will. I recall days in Egypt on which, after nine o'clock in the morning, it required real determination simply to step out of the house and into the sun. To walk in the pelting rain or a violent wind, as one so often has to do in England, though, is not much fun either. One can feel invigorated and perhaps virtuous when the walk is over, but the walk itself is something to be got through rather than enjoyed. I don't know how often I have had to walk my dogs over the downs in that sort of weather, cursing England, the dogs, and myself for ever having them. Even the dogs look miserable and there is probably only one thought in all our minds: how quickly can we get back home again?