So have you failed at anything lately and what did you learn about that failure?
Well, funny you should ask about that...
I was in a tournament this past Saturday competing in forms, and I was doing a hyung—Palgwe Chil Jang—that I know well and have even worked out some preliminary ideas about bunkai for. And I was just humming along until at one point, about 2/3 of the way through, I just blanked on the next move. It was only a fraction of a second, but it showed, and I didn't do very well in the competition, though better than I though I would, given that it was so obvious to the judges that I had blanked. I tend to have very bad nerves for that sort of thing, whether it's MA or giving a paper at a conference on something in my field, even something I've worked out in minute detail and know top-to-bottom—doesn't matter; the performance situation is enough to replace my clear picture of what's involved with this chaotic strobe-light confusion. It wasn't quite that bad on Saturday—the move did come back to me, just a millisecond too late though.
What it showed me was that I need to add another `bookmark' to the form, in addition to those I already have there. When I'm learning a form, there are, I've found, specific places where confusion is going to arise because the move at that point is very similar to a move that's already been done just a little while before, so that the proximity in time of the two similar (but not identical) moves is a perfect place for confusion to arise—like, where the hell
am I in this form?, sort of thing. I have a way of `tagging' such places, so that they get a kind of mental circle drawn around them, and a little warning: this is a double
mid level knifehand, not the double
down knifehand from three moves earlier, so the following move is the damned front kick, not the lunge punch, etc. Usually I only need one or two of these mental bookmarks; mostly, the form seems to go on rails, when I've worked on it for a bit. I'd thought the point where I blanked was one of the latter, but clearly, I need that mental bookmark (or highlighter?) for it. There's another tournament coming up next April that I'll do the same hyung in, and I'm pretty confident I'll get it completely right next time... we can but try, eh?