Kendo – Zanshin

I’ve found myself relating more of my kendo practice to the rest of my day to day life lately. Concepts such as Zanshin (loosely translated to focus) are important even outside the dojo. My dojo’s sensei, Victor Harris, explained a breakdown of Zanshin into 3 aspects: the initial Zanshin of preparation, that of execution (of the cut in the the Kendo context) and the Zanshin of finishing up, for the next task. This applied correctly could lead to a perpetual cycle of focused activity. Taken into my every day life as a software developer and student of life, I find a lot of time is spent without much focus. Applying this concept to simple day to day activities helps one trim the fluff, so to speak, and promote consciousness of one’s environment and the tasks at hand. Focus and analyse the problem at hand, approach the task heartily and survey your work on completion.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Kendo, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.