A couple of weeks ago, when I was doing some house painting, I started thinking about the 80’s movie Karate Kid. Now, I hear you thinking, “What kind of a mink is this guy?” but let me explain.
Daniel got his butt kicked by the tuffguy Karate bikers Cobra Kai and he wanted to learn Karate to be able to defend himself and impress the Cobra Kai leader’s ex-girlfriend.
Daniel tried to learn Karate from a book on his own at first, but then he met Mr. Miyagi, a small-figured, very unassuming old Japanese gardener. Mr. Miyagi agreed to teach Daniel Karate if Daniel would work in his Japanese garden in exchange. First Daniel had to paint a wall. Mr. Miyagi worked him hard and was pedantic about how to go about painting. The next day Daniel had to sand Miyagi’s whole deck with two pads. Daniel wasn’t really into the service at hand, but he was willing to work long days because he was waiting for the fruits of his work, the Karate lessons. The next day Daniel appeared at Mr. Miyagi’s house again, and again asked if they’d start practicing Karate but Mr. Miyagi made Daniel wax his dozen hot rods, again insisting on going about it with a very precise and particular style, and after that he had to drive nails with a hammer a whole day. Finally Daniel got so frustrated that he started shouting at his guru, saying that he’s just wasting his time and he’ll never learn Karate in time for the big tournament where he was supposed to beat up Kobra Kai. Then Mr. Miyagi said: “Do the waxing of the car” and the old man tried to throw a punch at Daniel. Daniel did the movement he had repeated thousands of times while waxing the car with a round movement, and the movement turned out to be a Karate defense. Miyagi went through all the different menial tasks and they all turned to be defense movements or kicks.
The reason why this came to my mind while doing service was because that’s what service is about as well. We do things that seem completely ordinary, like painting houses, gardening, construction, cooking etc. but if we do it under right guidance with a right goal in mind, we will automatically advance spiritually. And if the motive and ideal aren’t in place, we won’t learn. It’s not like all farmers will become spiritual or all gardeners Karate masters just because they repeat certain things.
It’s easy to think like Daniel-san, that “what does pot-washing have to do with loving Godhead?” but as the domestic tasks taught LaRusso Karate, service is a practice in sincerity and purity, repetition in order to develop a right kind of attitude that will attract the absolute. And as the work itself became Karate, the same way service itself is spiritual, although in the beginning we do it just to get a result from it, and approach our guru mostly with a motive that is mixed with selfish interests.
If we stick to the instructions of our Mr. Miyagi and push through, when our final match comes at the time of death, we will be able to kick the butts of the Cobra Kai of selfish desire and obtain real feeling for the truth. And even if we get the trophy and the girl that we set out to achieve in the beginning of our practice, it doesn’t mean anything in the end anymore, because through coming in contact with a person who has a broader vision of life we were able to transform.
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