A Quote by Shoshin Nagamine

Even after many years, kata practice is never finished, for there is always something new to be learned about executing a movement. — © Shoshin Nagamine
Even after many years, kata practice is never finished, for there is always something new to be learned about executing a movement.
In the past, it was expected that about three years were required to learn a single kata, and usually even an expert of considerable skill would only know three, or at most five, kata.
When I finished my college education my agent said to me …'The key to beauty is to be always educating yourself, always learning something new, always doing something new and to have something to talk about.' And I never forgot that, and I think that's how one ages beautifully.
If you practice for ten years, you may begin to please yourself, after 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30 years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist-then you may please even God.
Once a kata has been learned, it must be practised repeatedly until it can be applied in an emergency, for knowledge of just the sequence of a kata in karate is useless.
I just finished a film a few days ago, and I came home and said I learned so much today. So if I can come home from working on a little film after doing it for 45 years and say, "I learned so much today," that shows something about the cinema. Because the cinema is very young. It's only 100 years old.
In New England, I learned so much about football. I always thought I was a smart player, even though I never thought about anything but the six inches in front of my face. In New England, I was forced to learn so many schematic concepts.
Hoping to see karate included in the universal physical education taught in our public schools, I set about revising the kata so as to make them as simple as possible. Times change, the world changes, and obviously the martial arts must change too. The karate that high school students practice today is not the same karate that was practiced even as recently as ten years ago [this book was written in 1956], and it is a long way indeed from the karate I learned when I was a child in Okinawa.
It was hard to become an astronaut. Not anywhere near as much physical training as people imagine, but a lot of mental training, a lot of learning. You have to learn everything there is to know about the Space Shuttle and everything you are going to be doing, and everything you need to know if something goes wrong, and then once you have learned it all, you have to practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice until everything is second nature, so it's a very, very difficult training, and it takes years.
The meaning of the directions in kata is not well understood, and frequently mistakes are made in the interpretation of kata movements. In extreme cases, it is sometimes heard that "this kata moves in 8 directions so it is designed for fighting 8 opponents" or some such nonsense.
I've learned after so many years in this business that nothing is set in stone until you're on set. I've been told I was the choice for years and never got hired. So I never go there in my mind.
In fact, I had never imagined that seven years after my ordeal, the #MeToo movement will start and that I will be talking about it all over again. This is nothing but karma. Dibakar has directed six films, even though I didn't get any films after I went public with my allegations.
Even in the forty years that I have been practicing Karate, the changes have been many. It would be interesting to be able to go back in time, to the point when the kata were created, and study them.
I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all. What I learned from it is that today seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back because I believed in it completely and utterly.
After almost 30 years of playing this sport, I've learned something. I've learned that, no matter what happens, or happened... or where you are, or where you've been... at the end of the day: tennis is tennis. It's always, always tennis. And there's nothing better.
Whenever a horse has learned a new movement or a new aid in its basic form, the rider should give him a break and deliberately ride something else for a few days or weeks. When he returns to the movement, he will notice how much more easily the training will proceed.
No matter how many years you play, it's always something new and exciting. It's sports, you never know what may happen.
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