Today, I did the hat trick.
A hat trick, according to The Guardian, was when the cricket club would present a member a new hat upon completing three wickets in one game. I originally heard it in terms of hockey, when a player scored three goals in a row. But my hat trick has nothing to do with sports.
I don’t remember when I started calling it that, but I’ve been calling it that ever since. For me, a hat trick is a day with three, very different, accomplishments in it:
- 10 minutes of waiting worship
- 1,000 new words
- 3 Sanchin kata
If you’re a little confounded by these, let me break them down.
10 Minutes of Waiting Worship
As a (Liberal) Quaker, my worship of God and awareness of the Presence do not involve set prayers, or songs, or pew aerobics. Some folks, even some Friends, find these things bring them closer to the Light, and I’ve sung for joy or repeated a mantra before. But the beating heart of my religious life is sitting in silence among Friends on Sunday morning, praying stillness into my soul so that I can hear, and heed, the still, small voice of God. Outsiders call it silent worship, but among Friends, we call it waiting worship. It’s not so much that we are silent, as that we are waiting for God and waiting on the Presence of God among and between us.
The early Quakers had a practice of retiring daily, or as often as possible, which I understand to be a Friends’ Meeting “in good order” that happens to have only one Friend in it. Each Friend sits down, settles down, and centers down, letting God’s Light illuminate them and enlighten them. Not quite meditation, not quite prayer, it seems to be the Quaker experience par excellence. And I do not retire nearly often enough.
1,000 New Words
Jack London (my problematic patron saint) called it his stint. Ray Bradbury sat down on Monday and wrote a few thousand words of new story, editing Tuesday and submitting Wednesday, every week for most of the 1950s. Stephen King cruises on about 1,200 a day.
And like these working-men before me, I lay down 1,000 more words on my latest project (or blog post) before I can rest for the day. Edits don’t count, research don’t count, revisions only count if I add a scene or a character. It’s laying down raw first-draft wordcount, the most sacred of writerly tasks, the holiest of holies. Everything else is just publishing.
It started out as a minimum bar to keep my production up. It’s become so much more. I used to think of the words of my stint as like rail, something we lay down and leave behind, always moving forward. Now I think of the thousand as ballast, weight laid by my keel that makes me more stable and better able to weather high seas and sudden storms. I am happier and healthier each day I meet my stint, and exactly the reverse the days that I don’t.
Of the three components of my hat trick, I easily hit 1,000 new words more often than I hit 10 minutes in waiting worship or 3 sanchin kata.
3 Sanchin Kata
If you practice Uechi-ryu karate, this is self-explanatory. If you don’t practice Uechi-ryu but practice karate, you might know what a kata is, but not know Sanchin. If you took one look at that and said “can you eat it?” then read on.
Kata (or, in other martial arts, forms) are the set solo practice exercises used to teach technique in East Asian martial arts. If you’ve ever seen old people in the park doing t’ai chi, they’re all doing the same form (probably Beijing 24-Step Form). Individual karate styles are strongly defined by their kata, which kata they teach and how they practice. My tradition, Uechi-ryu karate (Uechi family style), rests on a kata called sanchin or “the three battles.” Here is an Okinawan grandmaster showing us all how it’s done.
Sanchin has acquired a semi-mystical status and no small amount of superstition. Master Uechi himself often said “all is in sanchin.” At my dojo, growing up, we did one each of the other eight kata…
…and three sanchin.
To do three sanchin requires going through the other five Uechi-ryu kata that I know, stretching, probably also doing my daily core regimen. At the gym, I might even play with the kettlebells or dance or hit the heavy bag. But if I accomplish nothing else physically, all is in sanchin.
Bringing It All Back Home
Straightforward enough, but it’s become more over the years. I mentioned how writing ballasts me. Extending the nautical metaphor, writing is ballast, sanchin is maintenance, and waiting worship is trimming the sails. “I laid down a thousand words today” is so many pounds of ballast along my keel, weighing and centering me, allowing me to weather storms that should otherwise have tossed me over. But it’s ballast of grain or sawdust, and soon grows sodden and slips away, and I have to lay more down. Sanchin is maintenance, the bo’sun’s trade, tarring line, scraping barnacles, mending sails, making baggywinkles. In port, I can work deeper, but even out at sea, I can lean her over and scrape away all the barnacles that built up as long as there’s a sand drift that’ll hold her …but however I do, I need to keep ship-shape and Bristol-fashion. Waiting worship, though, is easiest to understand: it is to find the prevailing winds from God, and rather than fight it, adjust my sails to better work with wind and water to get where I need to be.
Days I do the hat trick, I feel balanced, well-kept, and agile. I feel the most R. Jean Mathieu I can be, like I’ve lived up to some inner standard. Do you have anything like that? Some task or series of tasks that make you feel the most yourself? Tell us about them in the comments!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to center down and listen for the still, small voice…
Recent Comments