Surprise, surprise, I’m in NYC again! Four days of meetings and training. On the upside, a number of coworkers from overseas are here, and it’s aways fun to hang out with them.

Last night I met with our (R’s and my) friend Lynn. We’ve know each other for almost 10 years I think, mainly online, though we lived in the same city for a year several years ago. Since then we’ve sort of fallen out of touch, only talking occasionally online, so we actually had quite a bit to talk about.

We met at Tír na Nóg which is a very nice Irish restaurant and pub. Lynn had arrived fairly early because of some confusion with the train schedule and already had a couple pints of cider in her. I ordered one while we waited for our table and then a pint of Guinness right before we were seated, which was around 6:30.

Like I said we had a lot of catching up to do, and, as it turns out, we’re both talkative drunks, so we talked until nearly midnight at whic pointed we realized that she really needed to get back home and I really needed to get back to my hotel since I had training that started at 8 am the next day.

Aside from just information dumping about what we’d been doing, how SOs and pets were, we talked a lot about the parallels and contrasts in our relationships with our spouses (around the R and I were separated, she had gotten divorced). As we drank more the conversation became more philosophical. We talked about relationships and how people fight, politics, religion, and world views. I related the very apt analogy with something an Aikido sensei said to me once: “they don’t move like us”. He was referring to people that don’t or haven’t practiced aikido much – and it’s very true. The analogous statement, in the context we were discussing, was “they don’t fight like us” – in reference to people who haven’t had much couple’s counseling (which R and I have).

When you do marriage/couple’s counseling you learn all sorts of rules about how to fight fair and there are numerous parallels in aikido’s philosophy. But, when you are having an agrument with someone who doesn’t play by the same rules, so to speak, things go off in a very different direction than the one you intended and you have to fight differently, or, in aikido, you have to use a different techinique. In both cases you can chose to take the confrontation into a more destructive direction (usually a non-aikidoka will put themselves in a very vulnerable postition in an effort to get out of the technique you are trying to use) or you can try a different tact to defuse it.

We both had a feeling that there was some grand unified personal philosophy in all this that would allow us to balance work and life, self and others, rationalism and spirituality, and so on. Maybe in another decade or two someone will figure it out… or maybe we needed to drink more, or had drunk too much. Who knows.

Regardless, it was a great evening, and worth the vicious hangover I had this morning that was compounded by the fact that I’d mixed alcohols. ;-)