Ichi go, ichi e

It's a Sunday night and The Dear Lady Wife is watching Lark rise to Candle fluff or whatever it is called and here I am doodling away on my blog and for once I AM STUMPED FOR A TOPIC. Oh my God, is this it? Is this the first sign of a decline in my literary career?? The thing is with blogging that you've only got a few words to get your point across; it's not like a conversation where you can take as many words as you need (and my students will tell you that I take a lot). There's a saying in Japanese familiar to many martial artists which goes "Ichi go, ichi e" which can be translated as "one encounter, one chance" and whilst I could use the fantastic edit facilities to change this entry later I prefer to see where it goes. In fencing and martial arts (and blogging) we generally have more than one chance as it's not normally a matter of life or death when we participate in our chosen art. In the old days of Samurai Japan it certainly was one chance only. A duel back then would usually result in the death of one or both of the protagonists. If they got a technique wrong they didn't have a chance to correct it later.
In my previous post I discussed the fact that we are lucky in our modern sport that we can afford to make mistakes. We can always have another go. However where the saying holds true is when we stop ourselves during the execution of a move because we think it's gone wrong. If you were fencing for real you wouldn't stop; you'd have to carry through with the move and hope it worked. Hesitation would be fatal. So next time you're fencing and you pull up short just remember "one encounter, one chance".
Wow, I seem to have come up with a topic after all!