t home I pondered over the events that had occurred recently. And then I remembered my body. All the time that
my thoughts were distracted, the pain was hidden and existed on some distant level of thought. But as soon as I thought about my overtrained muscles, they immediately replied with a sharp pain, just as a loyal dog responds to the call of its owner by barking. My entire body started to cry out and break apart, and my mind began to feel intensively sorry for my poor body, blaming my real “I” for the trial I sentenced it to, to sympathize with and be compassionate to my extremities.
I forced myself to sit in the lotus pose to meditate. It was very hard to relax and even harder to concentrate. But still, my persistence brought me small results. In one of my attempts at purposeful concentration, the pain was forgotten. Meditation went smoothly. Only when a foul thought flashed across my mind did the pain commence again. At that time I clearly was feeling a streamlet down my hand. I thought, “This hand muscle hurts the most. Stop! Aha, I got you, leader of distemper. It’s you who spoils all my attempts. Alright, alright. This time I didn’t manage to start a conversation with Sensei, but next time at the meditation training I will certainly find out how to cope with you.”
When I came out of the meditation, I started to reflect logically, “I wonder if I have schizophrenia. I start to speak with myself and try to catch someone inside of me. Maybe I am already going crazy?” And at the same time another thought appeared in my mind, “It’s a good indicator. If I were to think like that more often, I would reach my goal faster.” At some internal, inaccessible level, I understood what it meant. But my mind yelled, “What goal? Who’s speaking again?” Completely confused by my thoughts, about who is who and what I really wanted, I fell asleep, following the example of my flesh, which was ruthlessly exhausted during the training.
The next day, my body became completely alien. Not only that, it was hurting and moving like a rusty robot. I got even more interested, as I had never seen myself in such a state. The autopilot evidently got turned off. I had to invent new ways to operate my body, even just to put clothes on. It was good that my parents went to work and didn’t see all of my comic horrors. Since I was busy with this disobedient machine, I was almost late to school.
I felt pretty much fine during the lessons, although it was strange to feel like a robot. The very last lesson was gym class. This was the end of everything. I tried to obtain leave from the teacher, but he was a rather conservative man and an awful bureaucrat. Our pains didn’t worry him. My only chance of leaving was by bringing him an official permission slip. I had an official note at home, hidden far away from my parents, because I liked gym class and didn’t want to sit aside during them, despite the opinions of the doctors. Even more so, the exercises we did were never very difficult, in my opinion. During the trainings with Sensei, we tortured our bodies much more. But today for the first time I regretted that I didn’t bring this paper with me.
Though during the day I had managed to move somehow, I had a hard time with the warm-up. And today, as if on purpose, there was a test on push-ups. “I certainly won’t survive. I won’t be able to do even one, especially after yesterday,” I thought. “He is such a bureaucrat and will not even listen to me without a note...” And I began upbraiding this man in my evil thoughts.
During the next break, while thinking of a word worse than the previous one, suddenly the words of Sensei softly arose in my mind, ‘You should not wish bad to other people, even in your thoughts.’ “Oh! What am I doing,” I woke up, “I am creating a trap for myself.” Cooling my temper down a little, I started to think soberly, “What’s the point of swearing at him in my thoughts and looking at him gloomily? I will just be more upset and will be rude to him during the test. He will return the favor, will give me a bad mark, and will call my parents. My parents will find out that I haven’t brought my paper to school and also will become upset. Why do I need all of this? And what if, as Sensei says, I try to put myself in his shoes? After all it’s not his fault that I came to the lesson down and out. Does he know that all yesterday evening, I was in fact preparing for the test? He doesn’t know. Then why should I be angry with him? He simply does his best to fulfil his job. And as far as my doctor’s note is concerned, he also needs to report for his lessons. What if the director or some revising commission comes to check on him? I can understand his position in this case.” Thus having put my thoughts in order, I noticed that my anger vanished and now I was able to think about how to solve this problem in peace.
After the warm-up, I again went to the teacher and calmly explained the situation to him. I said that the day before I had trained intensively and had suffered terribly, but for the next lesson I would certainly do push-ups, even twice as many. I also added that I completely understood that he’s fed up with our constant complaining.
“Well, you understand, you were also young once.” That last sentence burst from me by accident, but obviously stirred up some good memories from the teacher’s past, because the next fifteen minutes we listened to stories about his active youth. And when the test finally began, I asked him, “So, should I do pushups?”
“Alright,” he genially waved his hand, “you will do it
To the great joy of the others, half of the class also “didn’t have enough time.” When the bell rang, my classmates said with smiles, “Great! Listen, maybe for the other lessons you’ll evoke the teachers’ memories of their far-away youth, and maybe they won’t have time to ask us about homework. That would be great!”
“I’m not a wizard,” I answered jokingly. “I’m just learning.”
After class, I had a rather pleasant feeling inside. Nobody suffered moral damage and, more than that, all remained satisfied. This pleased my vanity, and my megalomania started to grow by leaps and bounds. I didn’t notice, though, until my friends listened to me in the evening and joked around.
“You inflated this story like a soap bubble,” Andrew remarked with a smile. “What’s so special in that? I do such tricks almost every lesson. You simply need to act with ingenuity and humor.”
“Yes, but do you tame your anger every lesson?”
Andrew thought about it and said, “That’s true… but humor so far has always helped me to understand teachers.”
“Listen!” Kostya tapped him on the shoulder. “This is a brilliant method to fight with anger… Do you remember Sensei’s guys: Eugene, Stas, and others? They never stop joking.”
“Exactly!” confirmed Andrew.
“You see, everything is simple, as Sensei said. You were wondering the whole night how to fight with your anger. Here is an answer for you… Well, now you’ll have to joke with your mind all your life.”
And then Kostya added calmingly, “Don’t worry. We will bring you tasty cakes at the mental hospital…”
“Stop it! You always confuse everything.”
The guys laughed and we went to attack the overcrowded tram. On board of the tram, Kostya said to Andrew, “By the way, I have also spent this night not in vain.”
“With whom?” Andrew inquired with a smile.
“Dirty mind! Not with whom, but on what, think deeper. I made a brilliant discovery!”
“In the sphere of self-love?”
“I’m serious. Listen, I’ve discovered a chain of events. If you weren’t beaten up by those lanky fellows five years ago, you wouldn’t have started to practice karate. And if you wouldn’t have started to practice martial arts, you wouldn’t have pulled me into this business. And if you hadn’t dragged me, we would have never met Sensei and wouldn’t have found what we have found and what we are now learning. At least, if we had read about this information somewhere, then certainly we would’ve considered it complete nonsense. While this way we were convinced and have seen it, as they say, with our own eyes. In short, if you hadn’t been beaten up, we wouldn’t have found this gold-bearing spiritual vein! That’s it!”
“I agree. But what makes you think that it’s because of you we met Sensei? The address of his school was given to us by a complete stranger from that previous school of Wushu. Neither you nor I knew anything for sure. We simply started a conversation about psychic phenomena by chance, and later found out about Sensei.”
“Yes. But I dragged you to this training,” Kostya defended his theory. “You were so resistant, remember, and didn’t want to go. And that guy appeared exactly that day by chance. He was waiting for his friend in the changing room.”
“Yes, he was waiting, but he would’ve kept silent if he hadn’t seen our magazine with an article about psychics.”
“Which magazine?”
“Well, remember, Tatyana brought it from home that day. You and I were indignant that we would have to drag this burden with us all day instead of just giving it back in the evening.”
“Ah! Exactly!” Kostya recalled.
“Well, I put it on the windowsill. And that guy was probably just bored sitting around, so he asked if he could read it. As you know, one word led to another, and he gave us Sensei’s address.
“Right, that’s exactly how it was.” Having sighed, Kostya added, “It is always like that: such small facts kill the most beautiful hypothesis… Alright, then my theory will look this way. If you hadn’t pulled me into martial arts, I wouldn’t have brought you to this training. And further, had Tatyana not brought a magazine, our group wouldn’t have met Sensei, and so forth.”
“Still, everything started with the magazine,” persisted Andrew, further developing his thought, “and with the article. We became interested in these articles because… why?”
“What do you mean why? Because… Ah! It was she who launched all of that, she infected all of us with stories of phenomenal people,” said Kostya nodding towards me.
“Exactly!”
The guys looked at me. “And why did you become interested in them?”
“Me?” I was a little confused and right away wiggled out. “Me… I was inspired by movies.”
“Oh! And movies were shot by…”
The guys were carried away, untwisting the whole chain of imaginary events.
Tatyana smiled and said, “You guys, I’m ashamed to say, will come soon to primitive man,” and she mimicked them in a funny way. “If that man had been caught by a saber-toothed tiger, then you wouldn’t have existed and therefore wouldn’t have met Sensei.”
“Hey, that’s a thought,” smiled Kostya.
“Men,” complained Tatyana. “They always find logic in everything. We have met Sensei, that’s great. That’s the way it should be, it’s destiny. And that’s all. There is nothing to argue about.”
