Excellence

When a child meets something new, he is driven out of curiosity and pleasure. He tries out everything he can with great creativity. when he fails, he tries harder, when he succeeds, he wants to recreate that moment. He reaches the limits of that new thing and even finds new ways to use it. his imagination and creativity are not blocked by experience, enabling him to try things that seem impossible (and sometimes he makes them possible). This is excellence.


When we grow up, our environment puts us into patterns that literally eliminates any notion of that childish excellence. this is done by driving us through an increasing process of fears: fear of failure, fear of being left alone, fear of being left behind, fear of being rejected. Suddenly you are expected to reach certain goals in your life, goals that show your progress of fitting into the pattern. you are rewarded and accepted and patted and hugged by your surroundings when you reach these goals and that nourishes the fears to grow stronger. This also becomes easier - you don't really need to be excellent, you only need to be better than the ones around you. you fall into that pattern and you already start to believe in it. You become the one who demands that pattern from others. Your excellence is now driven out of fear. you need to prove something or be proved wrong.

This cycle, mentioned above, is pretty weird because it always has a paranoiac notion of a bigger plan that is being plotted behind the scenes. Maybe by the government trying to make us slaves out of free will, maybe tycoons are trying to make us better consumers, maybe it is the devil himself. Actually it is a magical cycle that you and I spin. It is our participation that makes it go on. Trying to stop it makes more of the same. Many questions remain unanswered, like how all this cycle started anyway or what really does it take to stop it. For now I think that a huge change of course will be to open our eyes and see the situation as it truly is. Then, try to invite that investigative little child in you to come out and play.Then, just play.

Capoeira, for that aspect, makes things very clear. Your excellence depends on your joy.
Capoeira has a mind of it's own. It introduces you situations and if you stay rigid you will quickly meet the ground but if you flex and flow then you will beat any obstacle in your way. This aspect in capoeira can be found in many ways. You can see children repeating hundreds of Au's before mastering it and immediately after that, going on to practice macaco.You can see grown-ups shedding off their long day and transforming into a joyful, playful creature in the roda. On the other hand you can see people saying "Oh, capoeira, in my age? oh, I couldn't even lift my leg"... To them it seems so real, yet, to a capoeirista it seems equally fake.

The joy and positive thinking that manifest better situations are those that allow a pure form of excellence to appear. In that excellence, That change that begins in you, affects your surroundings and in the end a cycle will be closed returning to you as a better surroundings for yourself and so on... In that excellence, you only compete with your own joy and comply to your own standards (avoiding from falling into misinterpretations of what the standards are according to the influences of society).

"To change the world, one should begin the change in himself" J.Krishnamurti

As many topics before and in the future, I'd like to thank my teacher Beduino for planting the seeds, Jiddu Krishnamurti for clearing the view and my wife for nourishing all this with great love. For this post I thank my son as well, for being a child around me, taking me back there and revealing to me my own grown-up conditioning.