How to Live in the Moment Like Musashi
Sword fights, fig trees, and a way forward
Our culture is defined by customs. Some are healthy, and others are toxic: buy things, stay busy, make money, seek pleasure, dream big, cater cravings; do not slow down; do not reflect; do not think each second of your time is sacred.
It is strange how when such customs are put to words they are uncomfortable, and yet when operative at scale they become a way of life. With an “way” like this, it becomes possible to live an entire life without having lived a single second.
Now how are we to tell if the customs we are accustomed to are good for us? How, if we do not step outside of them compare them to other customs? My intuition is we will find most customs care only for going to sleep — and only a few for waking up.
One of the latter is the Way of the Sword which goes like this: “The ultimate aim of the Way of the Sword was to be able to stand on the brink of death at any time: facing death squarely, unflinchingly, should be as familiar as all other daily experiences.”
Why, then, does this warrior ethic matter at present when we do not strap a katana and wakizashi around our hips at all times? How can this ancient custom reframe our relationship with our own culture and our own lives?
Let us roll with Musashi to see what the Way of the Sword looks like.
A scene from one of my favorite novels, Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, replays on the silver screen in my skull almost every day. I like to ruminate on it.
Eiji describes the precise moment when Musashi stood face to face with a samurai, swords drawn, and three more samurai joined forces against him: “Acting in unison, the three moved in on Musashi. At the same instant, Musashi’s sword, with the twang of a bowstring, pierced the air, and a thunderous shout filled the empty space. The battle cry came not from his mouth alone but from his whole body. From his opponents, arrayed on both sides of him, to front and back, came a hissing gurgle… Musashi felt vibrantly alive. His blood seemed about to burst from every pore… One against four, yet Musashi felt himself at no great disadvantage. He was conscious of a swelling in his veins. At times like this, the idea of dying is said to assert itself in the mind, but Musashi had no thought of death. At the same time, he felt no certainty of his ability to win… The wind seemed to blow through his head, cooling his brain, clearing his vision… Swords, men, earth, sky – everything seemed to have frozen solid.”12
It is significant our sword-saint stood alone against four samurai, felt no certainty of his ability to win, and yet felt at no great disadvantage. He met these four fighters in perfect inner harmony because every moment preceding this fight was spent habituating himself to the boundary between life and death. He knew that while we may only be brought to this boundary a few times in a lifetime, we may bring the boundary to ourselves at all times.
He made it a custom.
He made it a Way.
From one concrete, I am struck by a few immediate thoughts.
The Way of the Sword renders us independent from our environment: Musashi was the same man holding a tea cup as he was holding a katana. It also renders us independent from our culture: Musashi was ready for a four-on-one knife fight, no matter if he were surrounded by four screaming samurai or four purring geishas. What can stun such a man? What can break him?
My point is those who live according to the Way are tied to one another as if by an ancient thread. The same adrenaline flows through their veins as flowed through the veins of Socrates in Amphipolis and William Wallace in Scotland. The same autonomy exists in their minds as existed in the mind of a Knight in the Middle Ages and an Operator in a mini-sub off the coast of a country in the Pacific. The followers of the Way transcend both space and time because they occupy the same existential mode of mind, a mode of mind that subordinates the fictions of the present to the realities of the past.
This war and death mode of mind reframes peace and life. Through death, life becomes more vivid. Even as I wrote these words, the meaning of what I had written saturated my subconscious and I stopped and put the pen down to look around me. Time froze: suddenly I heard the swallow whistling outside my window and my eyes traced the cobalt blue veins of her wings; I saw the fig seedling on my desk and the sinewy veins sprawling across its violently malachite leaves; I felt the veins in my elbows throb with each heart beats worth of blood; I sensed a stirring swell of awe for the fact I exist, and am conscious, and have a profound responsibility to choose what happens next. When each moment becomes the last moment, the next moment becomes the first moment.
In the end, the Way matters because when we shrug off customs that keep us asleep, we not only own this moment for ourselves, but for others. War may never find us and those we care for, but danger might.
The significant point is enemy samurai with long swords still stalk among us, though in less elegant forms.
What, then, does this enemy look like?
They look like algorithms designed to sieze our attention and divert it from the divine unity of “swords, men, earth and sky”; highly paid influencers whose sole mission in life is to make us wish we are anywhere else and anyone else than where and who we are at this moment in time; rampant domestication that keeps us sheltered from Pleistocene-like tests of self-command and the existential rebirth that follows such strenuous trials; e-bikes and e-scooters and e-mopeds going thirty miles an hour on foot trails that are really only enjoyed at a walk of two miles an hour, wretched e-technologies that draw its e-people further and further away from the “swelling in our veins” brought on by muscular labor; customs that deleted every danger from our lives that might have given us the chance to scream a “battle cry” from every cell and neuron we possess, realizing that the closer we are to death the greater our savage pleasure in being alive.
In sum, the new enemies are two sequential outcomes: a life unlived and a death unearned.
Why, then, does the Way still matter?
The Way matters because it is a Way in a way-less world, or a world of infinite-ways, which in the end is the same thing.
It is a Way of independence, of nowness, and of usefulness — of treating each flowing moment as if it is as epic as a four-on-one sword fight.
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Yoshikawa, Eiji. Musashi. Translated by Charles S. Terry, Kodansha International, 1995.
I wrote about Musashi before in this essay, but that was a riff that went an entirely unexpected direction.
Thanks for this post. It reminded me to “smell the coffee” that I am about to make! It will be a great day!
“Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off…. the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things, whether thought of as good or as evil, is the function of life.” — Joseph Campbell