{"id":1269,"date":"2017-02-02T23:48:02","date_gmt":"2017-02-03T03:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/thezenpagan\/?p=1269"},"modified":"2017-02-02T23:48:02","modified_gmt":"2017-02-03T03:48:02","slug":"groundhog-day-and-ikuru","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/thezenpagan\/2017\/02\/groundhog-day-and-ikuru\/","title":{"rendered":"Groundhog Day and Ikuru"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

These are my notes for my meditation lecture at the karate dojo tonight. <\/i><\/p>\n

\n

Today is Groundhog Day. This is actually a holdover from the old Celtic holiday of Imbolc \u2014 some of you might know it as Candlemas at your church. It\u2019s halfway (give or take a few days) between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. The days are starting to get longer, you can see buds starting to swell up on some trees. In one way of figuring the seasons, this is the beginning of spring, while in another it\u2019s the middle of winter \u2014 this is probably the root of the story about the groundhog deciding if we get another month and a half of winter.<\/p>\n

But today I want to talk about the movie Groundhog Day<\/i>. It\u2019s a comedy from the 90s, where Bill Murray\u2019s character, Phil Connors, gets stuck in a time loop while covering the Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney. He lives the same day over and over and over again. Whatever he does doesn\u2019t matter, he wakes up the next day and the whole world is reset.<\/p>\n

And so at first he thinks, \u201cHey, great, I\u2019ll do whatever I want! Party time! Eat, drink, and be merry!\u201d But this gets boring pretty quickly. It\u2019s not satisfying at all. So he gets depressed. He even tries to kill himself, but that doesn\u2019t matter either, the world resets and he wakes up again the next day in the same bed with the same song on the radio.<\/p>\n

\"Still
Still from Groundhog Day, via Breck Film Fest<\/a>. Fair use.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Then he realizes, well, I have all this time. I\u2019m stuck here. I might as well use it to improve myself. He starts taking lessons in playing the piano and sculpting ice and speaking French. (It\u2019s kind of funny, because how would that work? The teachers don\u2019t remember him from lesson to lesson. The movie skips over that.)<\/p>\n

And as he does this, he\u2019s getting to know the people around him. He seems them every day, after all, and learns about their situation, comes to understand them. And he starts seeing the suffering and trouble around him. He knows that this woman is going to get a flat tire at this time, this boy is going to fall out of a tree at that time. So he decides to start helping them. He\u2019s there to help change the tire, to catch the falling boy.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also one person who dies, and the saddest and most poignant scene is when Phil realizes he can\u2019t fix that. He has to come to terms with death, too.<\/p>\n

Now because the movie is a romantic comedy, he falls in love and that\u2019s what eventually breaks the spell. But I think what\u2019s important is what he does in the time before that \u2014 all those loops through, maybe it\u2019s years, maybe thousands of years! People have different theories. But through all that time, Phil first tries to lose himself in partying, in simple pleasure. And it doesn\u2019t work. And he tries giving in to despair. But that obviously doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

So he does three things: he works to improve himself. He comes to love the people around him. And he uses the skills he learns to help make life better for the those other people, he becomes their guardian and protector and helper.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s really what we should be doing as karateka, isn\u2019t it? We\u2019re here to work on ourselves, to make ourselves better and stronger individuals. But if we\u2019re doing karate-do, the Way of Karate, we\u2019re also improving our heart. We learn that getting stronger and more skilled is useless unless we use it to help others. That\u2019s what Kaicho Nakamura means by \u201cLove, Respect, and Obedience\u201d, the principles of Seido Karate. (\u201cObedience\u201d here is meant in the sense of being obedient to someone\u2019s needs, to putting others first. It is little bit of a tricky translation from Japanese.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a lot like one of Kaicho\u2019s favorite movies, Ikuru<\/i>. That\u2019s an Akira Kurosawa movie about a man who learns he has cancer and not long to live. So like Phil in Groundhog Day, he tries partying to forget, but it doesn\u2019t work. He tries to find satisfaction is his family relationships \u2014 this is more of a Japanese idea \u2014 but that doesn\u2019t work either. It\u2019s when he devotes himself to helping others, in this case helping get a park built (not as dramatic as Groundhog Day<\/i>), that he finds satisfaction.<\/p>\n

In Groundhog Day<\/i>, the hero has a very long time to deal with, in Ikiru<\/i> he has a short time. And the movies have very different tones and come out of different cultures. But they both ask the question, what are you going to do with your time?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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