Life Lessons from Mr. Miyagi
As dads, we’re always trying to prepare our kids for growing up. There are lots of ways to do this, and lots of styles in which to do it, but regardless of style all good fathers want to set their kids up for being productive and responsible members of society.
Our kids, of
course, don’t see the full picture the way we do. And this means that they
don’t always understand or appreciate the ways in which they are being
prepared.
This reminds me of
one of the great movies of the 80s: The Karate Kid.
In that classic
coming-of-age underdog story, Daniel, the new teenager in town, needs to learn
karate for a tournament against the resident bully and his new rival – Johnny Lawrence
(of the Cobra Kai dojo!)
Daniel befriends
the low-key maintenance man at his apartment, Mr. Miyagi, who naturally happens
to be a karate master. The relevant part of all this is the way Mr. Miyagi goes
about teaching Daniel karate and preparing him for the tournament.
He has Daniel sand
his deck, wax his car (the famous, “wax on, wax off” scene), paint his fence,
and other such banal chores.
As you can
imagine, Daniel doesn’t understand why he’s doing all this and eventually
explodes at Mr. Miyagi that he’s just making him do all his chores and not
teaching him anything. When Mr. Miyagi tells him to demonstrate wax on and wax
off as he tries to hit him Daniel suddenly realizes he has built up hours and
hours of muscle memory in defensive karate technique. And probably a few new
pounds of muscle too.
The applicability
of doing chores, or following directions, or sticking with something monotonous
and tedious is not often perceived by kids. And unlike My Miyagi, dads don’t
often have the benefit of being able to demonstrate in an exciting way how what
they are teaching their kids is helping them.
I mean, taking out
the garbage isn’t exactly secretly teaching karate technique. You can try and
make cleaning their room an exercise in ninja training – but it’s a hard sell. Doing
yardwork, homework, or the dishes may actually be training them in a more
important way than the leg swipes they see in a ninja movie, but you’d be hard
pressed to get that message through to a 10-year-old.
So, what this
often means is that fathers labor through many years training their “pupils”
but don’t see much of a result for their work. They may even be challenged by
their trainees along the way. There is certainly no shortage of thankless sons
in literature and movies.