follow through to the other side

I told a few friends this week that I don't much care for traveling, but I do like to explore.

Thing is, you can travel without exploring -- most people do -- but you can also explore without traveling very far.

I don't mind traveling, I just want to eat well (not necessarily expensively) along the way and be able to explore by myself or with a friend who also likes to do the same.
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I thought a bit this morning about follow through, aiming, and what it means to "follow through to the other side", specifically wrt physical and mental fitness.

My personal trainer, Thomas, would often tell me that I had great form as I lifted weights with him, but as a martial artist, I'm not really that good.

In martial arts, as in my academic life, it took me quite a while to learn what it really means to follow through.

I don't have any of Bruce's books with me here today, but I kind of remember that he wrote about aiming through your strike rather than only "at" your target. That sounds kind of abstract, but when I think about it, I see the difference between imagining your "trajectory to" your target as opposed to seeing your "trajectory through" your target.

And while I've never done breaking, in the martial arts rather than in the toprock sense, I have spent a small of amount of time hitting my head against the kinds of problem sets your (good) professors like to give you as a graduate student, the ones where the professor doesn't know the answer (or nobody does! yet) and that doesn't bother you at all.

And if you allow me to extend the breaking-your-head-on-things metaphor, if we consider the problem of jumping up like Mario (Miyamoto's landlord, let's say :) to smash through a square block of bricks, I think you'll agree that Mario would be more successful if Mario imagines a "trajectory through" the bricks rather than just a "trajectory to" the bricks.

If you don't buy that metaphor, then let me ramble about the biophysics of variationally optimal geodesic motion and intent.
I think when I was younger, I was more apt to aim "to" a school rather than aim "through" a school. It's not surprising, given that I didn't have a great idea of what I wanted to do (although I did have ideas and a direction at the time).

But I think the thing is, if you can only imagine a trajectory "to" your target, you subconsciously will tell yourself to stop when you get there, because you don't know where you're going yet, and, to stop at your target, you'll have to slow down before you reach your target, which means you'll have much less "striking force".

So, that's how I've been kind of thinking about my thesis and my imagined research, as a target to aim towards, seeing my futureself follow through rather than just stopping at this first of many targets.