Dear readers! What's the difference between a King and his horse?! I'm not talking kiddie shit like one's an animal and one's a person, or one has two legs and one has four! If their form, ability, and power are exactly the same how does one become the horse that carries the king into battle, and the other becomes the king who leads the battle?!
According to Ichigo's inner hollow Zangetsu there's only one answer...
INSTINCT!
There's a theme that I found that serves as a predicting factor in whether or not I will love an anime or manga, and this seems to also predict whether most otakus will love a series as well. The theme is the glorification of the idea that an aggressive and strong spirit has the ability to overcome every challenge and defeat every enemy.
Hollow Ichigo's speech on instinct to Ichigo makes my blood boil like hell. Whenever I've been stressed out by the challenges of life I like to relieve myself by playing scenes like that for myself in order to indulge in the dominating attitude of a powerful and crushing force of nature!
Here's the deal: In order to be powerful we have to seek out the struggle and pursue domination tirelessly. The world is full of uncertainty, the laws of physics establishes that the universe tends to be disorderly and chaotic and the fact that there is any order and life at all is miraculous, requiring more and more energy to be constantly put forth in order to power any action. This means that the only thing we can truly rely on is the spirit within.
I don't think that I became a master of statistics because it was just easy for me to understand but rather because I was so desperate after failing the first test that my survival instincts kicked into high gear and forced me to dedicate every ounce of energy I could spare to overcoming the hurdle of equations and word problems that threatened to ruin my life in quite a literal sense.
It was the fear, the determination, the adrenaline rush...in essence it was the emotional and spirited force within me that drove me from a failed first test to a final grade of an A come semesters end.
That was a really moving experience for me. It was an intellectual pursuit but it didn't feel intellectual. I was pushing forward with a force of spirit that I released from within myself. I can also attribute other successes I've enjoyed to the same thing. Learning to ice skate was a bit of a challenge because my body was not really accustomed to the way it had to balance and move. I found that when I tried to analyze and deliberately control my every movement I would trip and stumble constantly. The key to my success was something I struggle to find the words to explain. But I learned to skate through a process of allowing myself to adjust and adapt naturally and instinctively as opposed to trying to force some manner of control over the situation.
For some reason we think we can and should try to control everything in life, and that worrying and fretting over things in a paralysis by analysis will somehow make everything perfect...
But I think that Urahara was on to something with his speech early on in the series.
When you attack, you kill.
I don't think that this reliance on will power is illogical or unrealistic or ignorant of our physical limitations in spite of the fact that it often sounds like that is the case. I believe that it is simply the best way for us to make use of our physical power and our intellectual ability and overcome our weaknesses and limitations.
Spiritual power is the basic necessity that makes all of our achievements possible. This creed is the driving force of popular anime and manga. Our favorite anime moments are when our favorite heroes unleash the power locked deep within them to overcome even the most oppressive and degrading of circumstances. Allowing us to vicariously live our dream of looking at our opposition and shouting a big F-YOU!
I'm not certain that I'm being very energetic and strong in this post but that's because I'm genuinely not feeling like doing that, but I'm going with what feels like the best way to communicate with you guys this time around. I communicating naturally and with the flow of emotion and events that happen in my life.
Here's the message that I wish to communicate this time around. Do not have faith that things will work our alright, even Ichigo would have died early on if he was just working on plain faith. The alternative that anime and mangas demonstrate to us is in spiritual power. Don't worry about things going a certain way, instead make a decision that you are going to accomplish a certain mission or task or lifestyle and then commit yourself to it 100%. Use all of the force you can muster just like Ichigo or Naruto and don't ever give up. This is not a pep talk or some kind of inspiring speech. I am literally just telling you what you ought to do.
To summon all of the power of your spirit to do the job is always a perfectly reliable thing for you to do and it's the best advice I can give to readers I don't know. Because it applies universally. I don't know your particular life situation and I don't know what you're going through but I know that if you can make the choice to power through no matter what's in store you will be able to get things done.
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