Haruka stepped up to the line marking off the performance area, trying to calm her nerves and clear her mind as she bowed. Unbidden, the words of her professor at the last lecture sprang into her mind.
"Detachment! Whether you are in surgery, doing lab work, consulting, working in the E.R., wherever you go in the wide world of medicine outside these doors, you need to learn how to shut out distractions, allow the relevant information through your mental filter, and concentrate on the work at hand. When you are holding a patient's heart in your hands," he'd gestured, cupping both hands in front of him, "literally holding their heart — and their life — in your hands, you don't have time to worry about what your patient's family will think, or what they will do if you fail, or what you will say to them. You can't balk at the blood or the gory details of the accident scene when you are the first responder. You can't stop to feel when you lose a patient if you have nine more immediate emergencies lined up in triage, each of which will require your full attention and the best of your abilities. You can feel it later. You need to learn how to shut it off and focus."
Haruka felt then, as now, that it wasn't that different from what her sensei often told the sword class. She recalled the first time she had tried cutting a tatami mat, he'd said "There is nothing else but you and the sword and the mat. Don't let your mind get caught up on anything, do not let it linger and stop on any one point. What is outside the dojo is outside the dojo. Your school, your friends; outside. All that matters is inside. Right here, right now, it is three things: You, the sword, the mat. Let your mind flow freely among them, let it be where it needs to be, do not let it stop on any one of the three but do not limit it either. Find the state of No Mind."
It's easier said than understood, Haruka thought as she walked forward, the loose fitting legs of her hakama flowing behind her, and bowed once again in front of the rolled up tatami mat standing upright on the stand in the center of the performance area. She took the requisite five steps back and bowed a third time. She stood upright and closed her eyes, taking in a deep breath, trying to quiet the voices in her mind. Her hand, moving of its own accord, found the hilt of the sword at her waist as she breathed out. She opened her eyes, and...
The sword slid through the air, leaving but a whisper to mark its passing. The grass mat, rolled up and soaked in water, offered no resistance; the sword slid through it as if it weren't there. Haruka's hands and wrists were placed perfectly on the hilt, the angle of the blade's cutting edge in perfect alignment with the direction of the cut. She did not think on these things, she did not observe them, she just knew them. Practice and training let her hands find their place without needing her mind's attention. She raised the blade again for the second cut, the sword arcing toward the tightly rolled tatami from her left hand side, and she felt a moment of elation as another section of the mat slid off without resistance. That moment of elation, though, was a distraction, a mistake. It showed in her next cut, again from the right. The angle was off by less than a millimeter, but the smallest variance is enough. Haruka felt the slight twist of the blade at the end of the cut. There was the smallest of curves at the top of the remaining tatami mat. Maybe the judges would see it from where they sat, maybe they wouldn't, but Haruka knew it was there. She followed up quickly with an upward slash from the left, reversing the direction of her previous cut. The stroke itself was good, slicing cleanly through the mat, but in her disappointment in the downward cut, she had rushed it and taken off a couple centimeters more of the tatami than she'd intended. That meant her last two cuts would have to be closer than she liked, and even then she ran the risk of hitting the wooden dowel in the base upon which the rolled mat stood. She heard the reaction of the spectators, more distraction, and steeled herself not to take a quick glance to the front to see what the judges were thinking. Haruka launched into the last two cuts, both solid strikes but not as clean as her first two had been. Her last cut had come in just a little too high as she tried to avoid the dowel — there was a small inverted 'V' shape at the top of the roll where she'd caught the edge of the penultimate stroke. Haruka swallowed her disappointment, trying to keep it from showing on her face. She tried to concentrate on finishing the performance: Flick the blade out and back, draw the unsharpened back edge across her hand until the tip drops into place, and slide it into the sheath. Take five small steps backward, bring her feet together, and bow before leaving the performance area marked out on the floor.
Andrei (that "crazy foreigner", as her mother called him) was waiting for her after she finished wiping down the blade to remove any moisture or bits of the mat that could stick to it after a round of cutting.
"You were thinking about it too much again," he whispered, so as not to distract any other competitors. "Let go your conscious self, act on instinct."
"Who said that one, Musashi or Takuan?" Andrei had been bitten hard by the Japan bug and used English teaching as a way to pay the bills as he took every opportunity to absorb Japanese culture. Haruka guessed that he probably knew more about Japanese history than she did, at least from the Sengoku period through the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. He was always quoting some Zen Buddhist or other.
"Neither, that's Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars. Just because it's fiction doesn't make it any less true."
"Well, if you, our Sensei, my professor, and Obi-Wan all agree, then perhaps they are onto something about detachment. I know I still have a long way to go," Haruka replied. "I didn't see your match, how was it?"
"Better than last time, at least I got through all the cuts without getting disqualified." Last year, his sword had stuck in the tatami halfway through his second cut and had bent, ending his tournament performance. "Not as good as yours, though, no way I'll even place."
"Maybe next time," Haruka said, then mentally kicked herself. Andrei was going back to Romania at the end of the month due to his father's declining health, and he wasn't happy about either part of it. "Sorry," Haruka said, "I didn't mean..."
He waved down her apology. "It's ok. I'm resigned to my fate. How's your sister taking it? She hasn't spoken to me or answered any of my texts since I told her I was going back."
"She's been in one of her moods," Haruko lied. Her sister, Maiko, had been dating Andrei for the last couple of months. Haruka decided to leave out the fact that Maiko was supposed to have come to the tournament today to watch, but she'd blown it off to go to Tokyo Disneyland with some guy from her University Chemistry class. She'd learned a long time ago not to get involved in the details her younger sister's affairs. Detachment of a different sort?
She ended up taking third in the women's division.
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