Solving the Energy Crisis

I’m so tired today! I’ve had a busy week/weekend with a lot of martial arts, a lot of Christmas shopping and a lot of friend and girlfriend time, and today I’m reeling from it all. If I don’t get a full night’s sleep tonight I’ll die on my feet in class tomorrow. The funny thing is I don’t even want to go rest, I just want to go do more aikido. If I were in keiko (practice) right now I would be the awake-est, genki-est kid on the planet...it’s only the times outside of aikido that I feel tired. Recently I discovered the expression “genki wo morau,” meaning that you got energized by something, or literally that you receive genkiness (“feelin’ peppy”-ness) from something. At the end of an aikido class last week when we were all exhausted and sweaty and had trained really hard, I was glowing from being so happy and one of my sempai said, “jeez, how are you so genki right now?” I said, “I was tired all day but as soon as we started training I got all this energy from you guys.” The response was “thief! Give it back!” I love aikido. Tonight I want to go to keiko in the nearby town of Namikata, but I feel like I have to be prudent and take care of my leaving-the-country preparations (which are significant). I don’t want my last day here to be too frantic and awful...but knowing my track record, there exists a good chance that Thursday afternoon will find me crying into a half-empty suitcase as I contemplate going out to buy one last missing present for a friend back home with an hour left before my bus leaves for Tokyo. If only I had done all this last week, then I could be doing more aikido!