Musashi's Dokkodo (The Way of Walking Alone)

Insurance Executive:
Maybe if we still lived in Musashi’s time and we could hack to pieces
the neighbor on our left that plays his music too loud or hack up the
moron on our right that allows his pit bull to run free I’d agree with
this precept. But no such luck, err, I mean, thankfully we now live in
civilized times with strict laws against such violence.
To be apathetic about where one lives is a whole lot of naïve and
potentially dangerous. Let’s say you live on the edge of a high
seaside cliff that is crumbling away each year. While you might not
have as much lawn to mow as you did when you first moved in four
years ago, your indifference to where you live might result in your
family and your house falling off the edge and dropping into a
furiously agitated sea.
While he wrote this precept, one has to wonder how closely he
followed it himself. For example, he wasn’t indifferent as to where he
lived when he wrote at least one of his books. He didn’t choose a
writing site in a densely populated community or next to a musician
who taught young people wind instruments. No, he chose the dark,
dank quiet of a cave.
But might this precept be a metaphor, say, a continuation of the great
swordsman’s philosophy of don’t sweat the small stuff? Perhaps he

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meant it’s far more important to spend every waking moment on
perfecting the self, in his case his martial arts, writing, sculpting, and
painting. Maybe he thought that compared to the mastery of self-
defense—let’s not forget the violent times he lived in, not to mention
all the challenges that came his way—the place he rested his head
at night was irrelevant. While the times are certainly different today
and our modern culture is remote from the late 1500s and early
1600s Japan, I think Musashi might even today still be indifferent to
those things he deemed of less importance than his pursuits.
Some pundits say he was a genius because, by his own words, he
was self-taught. He never had a teacher for any of the things he
came to master. As we see so often, geniuses—great composers,
scientists, actors, and writers—are often so intensely focused on
their narrow field of expertise that other parts of their life are found
lacking. Put on a pleasant outward appearance? Who needs it?
Friends, family, and a spouse? Nah, too distracting… Home and
hearth? One more thing to sidetrack from what is really important.
Perhaps the takeaway here is how we should examine our lives to
deem what is really important and what we are wasting too much
time on. People for example. So often we waste time thinking about
people from our past. We still feel hurt by their actions or angry at
what they didn’t do. Why give them our precious time? After all, there
is a reason they didn’t make it into our future. When you dwell on
such things too much and too long, you make them more important
than they really are. Don’t waste time on people and things you have
lost. They are in the past. Learn from the loss—sometimes you
discover it really wasn’t much of a loss after all—and focus on your
life right here and right now. Live life in the present with an eye on
the future, don’t live it backwards.
To take this precept literally, I would have to disagree with the great
Musashi. It’s very important where you live. As a metaphor I can
agree with, however, care about the people and things in your life
that are important to you and rid yourself of those things that waste
your precious time.

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