The Power of the Decision

The morning was spent in a way I find hard to articulate. Everything felt like effort in the wrong direction — stances unsteady, muscles locked against themselves, the body presenting something like a full invoice for the week's work. I skipped lunch and slept, which the body clearly needed, and then woke into a version of the same feeling, which was discouraging in the particular way that feeling bad after rest is discouraging.

I was close to staying in for the afternoon. The case for rest was not unreasonable.

And then the sounds from the courtyard started — training already underway, the familiar rhythm of it moving through the walls — and something in me shifted before I'd made a conscious decision. The choice presented itself in the simplest possible terms: stay or go.

I went.

What happened in the instant of deciding — before I'd moved, before I'd done anything — was something I keep coming back to tonight. The tiredness didn't disappear, but it changed. Rearranged itself. Something in the system received the signal and responded to it, and by the time I was in the courtyard, I was already different from the person who had been lying down twenty minutes earlier.

The session was good. The first real warmth of the coming summer arrived between stances. Sweat and something like ease working together in the way they sometimes do when the body finally agrees with what you're asking of it.

What stays with me is the simplicity of it. An honest decision to train, made without forcing or negotiating with myself, changed everything about the rest of the day. More than the sleep had. More than the food.

The mind and the body aren't separate departments running their own operations. The decision doesn't happen in one place and get enacted somewhere else. It all happens at once. Our intent is simply limitless. I don't have a better way to say it than that.