Success from Failure, or something like that

The past week and a bit at karate has been interesting. It started two Fridays ago, when I was strangely the only student in class. (Maybe it was spring break? Or people were just lazy? Who knows.) After I warmed up, sensei had me start working intensively on Empi, my latest kata. I had to learned Empi before, way back in high school, but it was probably one of the later kata I learned, because I only vaguely remembered it. Anyway, at this point, I was past the relearning/remembering stage, and into the part that sensei refers to as, “Now you know it, so now we can fix it.”

I like Empi, I really do. It’s a fun kata, a pretty one, with lots of low stances and interesting implied wrist bends. Of course, all those low stances do get a little tiring, but I felt like I was getting better. The only bad part is the jump near the end of the kata. Now, I’m the first to admit that I am not a big flying and jumping technique person. I like to have at least one foot on the ground, thank you very much. I’ll throw kicks as high as you might like, but I don’t want to have to jump to do it. So I cannot even begin to count the number of times in the past month or so that I have heard the phrase, “Pick your knees up!” It’s easier said than done, I assure you. But it’s pretty much the only part of the kata I felt like I was having to learn how to do from scratch, so I figured I’d get better.

Then came the end of class, when sensei suddenly declared in the last ten minutes that he was going to start teaching me a new kata, from a different style. And it is indeed very cool, and probably more suited to the way I naturally move, and I like it, but my excitement about it is somewhat tainted by the suspicion that he decided to teach it to me because he became convinced that I would never be able to do the jump in Empi correctly and we should just give up.

Another strange thing about this new kata is that neither the kata nor the style appear to be mentioned with any kind of regularity on all the internet, so I don’t even have a way to confirm the name of the kata or what it’s supposed to look like. As far as I can tell, transliterating from Arabic-accented Anglicized Japanese, the kata is called Sinchin (which does not conform to Japanese pronunciation rules, but I’m also told that it is definitely not Sanshin, because that’s a different kata altogether), and the style is Shiteryu.