“My bank is different”. “Everything around you”. “You, without limits”. “Because you’re worth it”.

Marketing knows the needs and anxieties of its audience well, including the most deeply hidden ones. In an age in which everything seems to speak of the insignificance of the individual, of their frustrating powerlessness in the face of a History that sweeps everything away, marketing chooses a different path.

A narrative of a world that does not exist. There is no bank, in fact, that is different from all the others; there is a banking system, with its rules. No telephone company builds its network and services around individual customers, nor does a phone plan unlock unlimited and boundless powers in anyone.

And no, washing your hair with one brand of shampoo or conditioner rather than another does not increase the value of the person using it.

And yet, the data show that this kind of communication works. It is clichéd and worn out; deep down, you know perfectly well that it isn’t true. But that little bit of perceived empathy-from a brand, not from a person!- feels good. And you remain insignificant, only now with the self-assigned status of being a member of a community. You have value because you are a customer.

You have value because you are so insignificant that you need to feel like somebody simply because you consume.

Brutal? Yes.

Reductionist? Certainly: the dynamics are complex and certainly cannot be exhausted in a blog post about Aikido.

There it is, Aikido.

For those who refuse to resign themselves to the perspective of being one among many, Aikido, like any other discipline, offers a path.

A path that instead begins with a phase in which you have to accept being… one among many. You are a student; you try to copy the movement patterns and techniques presented to you.

And it is precisely during this phase of formal repetition that the first real crises arise. The body gives the mind back the lost awareness that we are not really so different from everyone else, while the ego demands to be credited with particular merits. Distinctions that arise from an attitude -comparison- that serves almost everything except focusing on the only aspect that matters in practice: one’s own journey.

If you overcome these first obstacles, which we might place in the physical and technical realm, you encounter another barrier, an even more powerful one. Attitude.

That stiffness that rises when I practice with that particular partner, in that particular situation. That desire for revenge, perhaps expressed through applying a lock just a little harder than necessary, to punish, dominate the other person, “just to make it clear who’s in charge”…

And that is where, if you are lucky enough to be guided by someone who has already been there, you understand that… you are not so different from everyone else.

When you overpower your partner in something that was never conceived as a combat sport in the first place, how are you different from someone who makes systematic abuse their way of life? Or their foreign policy?

When you give in to the temptation to crank a technique up to the maximum with a partner, how are you different from those villains you see on the news, against whom you organise petitions, peace marches and outraged social-media campaigns?

Recognizing that we are men and women made of both mud and infinity, capable of lofty impulses and miserable actions, is the task of reflection born from training, session after session. Keiko, precisely. And it is the necessary and sufficient condition for reaching the understanding that, yes, we can choose to stop being one among many.

Of course, it is much easier to keep the photocopier button pressed and continue repeating what we think we are capable of doing. That is the limitation of formal training, shu 守, to use a Japanese term.

The solution is neither the pursuit of originality (ha 破) for its own sake, nor a resentful detachment from one’s environment of origin (ri 離), convinced that we are neither understood nor valued.

Immaturity leads us to withdraw into ourselves. Either by endlessly reiterating what we know how to do, so that we never have to truly think about what we invest our time, energy and resources in; or by making the language of a discipline so personalised that it becomes impossible to communicate and therefore essentially useless. Then we blame the outside world. It is the others who do not understand. How could they fail to see my value? “Because I’m worth it”.

It is the different way in which we see and live what we repeat that fills it with meaning and gives us directions for inquiry. Seeking new perspectives and changing points of view is not merely a matter of physical geometry while performing a technique. It is what allows us to move from the need to assert that being different from others is a value to the urgency of understanding on what grounds we can claim to be unique.

And thus stop being one among many.

And while adults lose themselves trying to conform to the language of marketing, eventually believing the narrative more than reality, children know perfectly well what makes them unique. They know that when they step onto the tatami, nobody is left out. Nobody sits on the bench.

They know that by giving their best, one time after another, they will improve. And they recognise that improvement both in themselves and in others. Because a child wants to grow with others, but also wants to hear from outside what they already know inside.

“Mum, tell me you love me.”

Because none of us is one among many.

Disclaimer: picture by Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz from Pexels