Chief Instructor

About Aikido of Champlain Valley

Class Schedule and Rates

Directions to Dojo

Children's Classes

Dojo Newsletter

Frequently Asked Questions

Preregister for Intro Series

Links

E-mail Us!

How It's Supposed to Work by Jonathan Trigaux "It is better to have some unhappiness when one is still young, for if a person does not experience some bitterness he will not settle down." — From the seventeenth-century Samurai manual Hagakure I have a relatively large family, mostly attributed to various second marriages and their subsequent children. Thanks to this fallout of my nuclear family, I was an uncle at the age of five, and am currently the sixth of nine collective children, some of whom I have never even met. As one might guess from this, I am not particularly close with the members of my family. While I enjoyed a somewhat anonymous upbringing that encouraged self-sufficiency and independence, paternal mandates did not allow for participation in heavy contact sports or martial arts as a small lad such as myself would be easily injured. At twenty-one I began taking aikido classes at our beloved dojo, Aikido of Champlain Valley. Aikido was like nothing else in which I had ever participated, or even conceptualized. Moving out of the way when attacked? Not getting hit? Whoa! Conflict was something highly avoided in my family, and violence was certainly not encouraged, but for some reason getting out of the way of schoolyard attacks had never occurred to me either, so I ended up taking a lot of hits without doing much else. As sensible as getting out of the way sounds, it was and sometimes still is hard for me to get over the deep-rooted childhood response of taking your shots until your attacker gets bored and leaves you alone. One Saturday in early spring, after I had been doing aikido for a couple of years, my father came to Burlington. I hadn't seen or actually talked to him in a couple of years. He knew that I had started studying aikido, but had never seen it and didn't really know what it was about. We arranged to meet at the dojo so he could observe the classes that morning. The two of us watched the first class of bokken students in relative silence, with an occasional whisper from me describing certain elements of technique or etiquette. For the second class of open-hands work I donned my keikogi and took to the mat. As I trained I managed to keep my focus on the technique and my partners pretty well, though at times I could see my father watching out of the corner of my eye. I was reminded of my elementary school days on the rare occasion he would come to one of my soccer games. Back then I would be a little embarrassed to see him watching me from the sidelines, but at the dojo it didn't break my focus. After class was finished, after Sensei and my father had been introduced, after the mat was cleaned, my father and I left the dojo and went out to lunch. Even though he couldn't seem to remember the correct pronunciation of aikido ("ahwk-eye-doe" he would say), he appeared interested in what he had seen that day. He talked about his now-dead Uncle Kenny, my grandfather's brother, who had been a black belt in ju-jitsu and had studied in Japan for many years. He was keen to grasp the similarities between the two arts. I talked about things that I had learned since studying aikido, and all the things I have yet to learn. We parted company that weekend with a more refreshed perspective of each other and who we had become over the years. To be honest, I don't really understand families. I don't feel how they're supposed to work. On the other hand, I don't really understand aikido either, and how it's supposed to work, but I can already hear Sensei telling me that if it's something you love, that's no reason to stop trying.