BE TRUE TO YOUR OWN GOALS BY DESIGNING and CRAFTING YOUR OWN LIFE
Like expertly crafted lives, beautifully crafted samurai swords are stirring. Their elegant lines and gleaming beauty catch the eye. Thousands of years of war usage by warriors, such as knights, ninjas, and gladiators, made them strong symbols of power. Even today, samurai swords continue to play a role in ceremonial occasions in many parts of the world.
Forging a samurai sword is similar to forging a powerful, expertly crafted life. From design to completion, producing an exquisite samurai sword and life requires time, skill, and dogged determination. Creating effective swords and lives requires many steps that must all be completed with a high level of excellence to achieve a quality outcome.
Samurai swords must first be designed. The final shape and look is determined during this process. Similarly, the outcome of your life is determined by its design. Ask yourself how much time you spend designing your life? A beautiful samurai sword doesn’t magically jump from the forge, just as a beautiful life won’t usually magically appear in front of you. Design a wonderful life for yourself by setting really powerful, far reaching, worthwhile specific goals and by aspiring to do great and worthwhile deeds.
Samurai swords must be built with high quality steel to stay strong. Lower quality metals are easier to break and lose their edge quickly. Your life also must be built with strong material. Building your physical body with proper nutrition, exercise, and mental training is foundational to creating a strong life.
The art of Japanese Samurai sword making is like that. It reached an astonishing level of perfection as early as 800 AD — 1200 years ago. A Samurai sword is a wonderfully delicate and complex piece of engineering. The steel of the blade is heated and folded and beaten — over and over again — until the blade’s formed by 33,000 layers, forge-welded to one another. Each layer is a hundred thousandth of an inch thick. All this is done to extremely accurate standards of heat treatment. The result’s an obsidian-hard blade with willow-like flexibility. In your life, you must also find ways to pull yourself into new directions, and stretch yourself into new dimensions and experiences. Find life hammers that mold and bend you into more powerful shapes.
These blades represent a perfection of production standards that modern quality control hasn’t matched. Yet the Japanese craftsmen who made them didn’t know anything about temperature measurement or the carbon-content of steel. How do you suppose they repeated such perfection?
The answer’s one we’d be well advised to remember. Sword making was swathed in ceremony and ritual. It was consistent because the ceremony was precise and unvaried. The ceremony was beautiful — in action, dress, and color. Heat treating temperatures were controlled by holding the blade to the color of the morning sun. The exact hue was transmitted from master to apprentice down through centuries. Sword making was a part of Japanese art; and it was subsumed into Japanese culture.
That sort of thing wasn’t unique to the Japanese. It was true of 18th-century violin-making and 12th-century cathedral building. Ritual did what was later done with weights and measures.
Our intelligence, after all, runs deeper than a mere ability to read gages. Our great technologies arise out of a full range of experience that give us the applicable knowledge and know-how. They come from creativity that’s triggered by more than tables of technical data. Good technology isn’t independent of culture. The best doctor knows organic chemistry and his grandmother’s folklore. The best metallurgist knows about iron-carbon phase diagrams and medieval Japanese craftsmanship.
The best engineers know mathematics, physics, and thermodynamics. But they also know the world they live in. The best engineers have a deep-seated knowledge of the people they serve.
A Samurai sword is a wonderfully delicate and complex piece of engineering. The steel of the blade is heated and folded and beaten — over and over again — until the blade’s formed by 33,000 layers, forge-welded to one another. Each layer is a hundred thousandth of an inch thick. All this is done to extremely accurate standards of heat treatment. The result’s an obsidian-hard blade with willow-like flexibility. Sharp edges give the sword efficient cutting power. To be effective, our life career and relationship swords must also be very sharp. What do you do to continually hone yourself so that you will maintain a willow like flexibility and strong cutting edge? Your life will eventually become dull and uninteresting if it’s never sharpened. What activities keep things fully alive for you?
The completed samurai sword has been repeatedly heated at high temperatures and cooled repeatedly at lower temperatures to make the steel extremely hard. Similarly, our mastery life plan must be tested by fire and cold on many occasions before it becomes powerfully strong and very real, which causes our selves, skills, abilities, knowledge, lives and determination to become much stronger and realer. Tempering in our lives is not usually pleasant, but the long-term reward of a much greater certainty in what truly works and a stronger life – this alone makes it worth withstanding the continuous tempering of heat and cold that life gives to us as we strive to reach our dreams and aspirations.
Most people wield weak, wimpy, brittle, second-rate, low quality life swords that were reluctantly given to them by others, and they do little to maintain them. If something should go wrong they go to someone else and say “fix me.” I challenge you to take the time to create an extremely powerful, first-rate, masterful, world-class quality life sword!
When you continuously find and take the time, effort and attention to work on your expertly crafted custom creation it will serve you well, and you will have a much more effective tools at your finger tips to help you on your journey through life to achieving your Gold or High Green Zone level dreams and aspirations!
ALAN C. WALTER
29 May 2001
Copyright © 2001
Alan C. Walter
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED