Space, the final frontier.
These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Who among us, when looking at a starry sky, has never pushed their imagination beyond its limits?

This is how we are hardwired: we barely know our neighbors or the names of the streets in our block, yet we clearly perceive the boundaries around us, and our natural curiosity urges us to go beyond. To ask ourselves what lies on the other side of the border.

Practicing a martial discipline like Aikido offers everyone the chance to become the protagonist of a “space” exploration far greater than anything shown in science-fiction movies.

At first glance, the technical material to handle seems vast. And without diminishing a martial grammar as complex as the Japanese language, Aikido ultimately stands on nine technical pillars (ikkyo, nikyo, sankyo, yonkyo, gokyo, rokkyo, shihonage, kotegaeshi, kokyunage). Not ten thousand -nine.

We are aware that by adding weapons training and trying to create every possible scenario, the number of technical combinations rises into the thousands, and we have seen very few people ride them with spontaneity and fluidity. Yet the idea remains: at some point, the technical language alone reveals its limits.

After all, the ancient meaning of “desire” comes from this very idea: when the stars could not be seen, neither the future nor one’s direction could be understood, and this absence was called de-sidus -a lack of stars.

As students, we always expect our teachers to make training engaging and somehow “new.” Boredom and repetition are enemies of any activity, Aikido included.

As teachers, we know that within a few months a practitioner has already met all the stars in Aikido’s firmament. And partly because they cannot yet manage them, partly because they are few, and partly because they are intellectually easy to understand (though not to embody), the practitioner begins to desire something more.

This is where Aikido surpasses Star Trek. After all, Star Trek is a story -and no sane person expects to teleport home after leaving the cinema.
Aikido is not just a new narrative of oneself in relationship. It is truly the search, the discovery, and the exploration of strange new worlds.

What we often call the “final frontier”-some hypothetical technical competence- opens instead into an understanding of how we and others function. Behavioral patterns that seem fixed but hide peaks and abysses. When we dare to explore them, changes occur that a martial arts practitioner recognizes only over time.

Small things, very common. Very powerful.
Fear gradually gives way to resilience. Judgment to listening. Fixation to ethical rigor. Rigidity to understanding. Discouragement to the desire to rise again. And again. In general, we are surprised at how much our ability to remain within the same chaotic vortex as before has transformed.

Apparently nothing has changed. But everything has changed -and is still changing.

This does not exempt us from serious, ongoing study. Including technical study. Aikido in particular, and the martial world in general, constantly feel the temptation to retreat into an immaterial dimension to avoid admitting that technical, physical, material practice requires effort and exposes our limits. And behind this discomfort lies the greatest temptation of all: the escape from self-knowledge.

It is easier to pass oneself off as a guru than as an explorer.

But the question remains, even at the end of a technique performed at its best -together with the vivid desire.

Where is it that no one has ever gone before? What is our true final frontier?

Discalimer: Picture by cottonbro studio from Pexels