How to Eat Soup
All eyes on that fancy, more nuanced technique we’re watching the higher belts working on. The modified version of something we kinda already know. Temptations shifting our focus from our needs to our wants. These are the techniques found in the hot center of the soup bowl of infinite technique. Let’s learn how to eat soup!
Master Sauer talks of eating soup as a metaphor for how to intake proper ideas at their most appropriate times. As we eat hot soup we know that the edge of the bowl is our best bet, the best temperature to not get burned. Less risk of hurting ourselves diving into the center, delaying our progress in the soup consumption, and our progress on the mat. Diving into the middle can cause our learning to take backsteps, and we‘re forced to get back to the edge. And sadly, often burning ourselves badly enough will not only delay our progress, in the soup or on the mat, but carries the danger of our quitting either endeavor altogether. Eating from the center provides frustration and injury.
How to eat soup? Eating from the outside automatically draws the center towards us, as opposed to us diving in and getting rejected or hurt by it. And by the time the frustration wears off and we head back to the bowl edge, IF we even do, there’s the chance that the ideas have cooled too much to be of even lesser interest, and the cycle continues as the progress stifles.
Working the outside literally brings the inside, more “advanced” ideas our way, and at a temperature we can handle and build off of. It’s a balancing act of working what we think we know and exploring what we don’t. We know we’re doing it right when we learn an advanced technique and it just seems almost obvious, as opposed to mind blowing. That’s a good measure: if it’s mind blowing at first exposure we might be exploring too close to the middle. Nothing wrong with that (safety aside) but the next best step to capture it into our game would be to connect it to something more fundamental already in our game, closer to the edge of the bowl. We INVITE the advanced techniques to us by mastering the basics. By the time they are mastered, those sought after advanced techniques will be at the right temperature, delivered right to our spoon, to be digested most quickly and safely, pushing progress forward.