For Sensei to promote me to the next grade, nidan, was not just unexpected; it was like walking down the street, minding your own business, and suddenly being whacked upside the head by a bokken falling out of the sky. I guess, from her perspective, I can certainly understand her being comfortable promoting me without a test. After all, she has been my teacher since my days as a 4th kyu student. She knows my aikido probably better than I do. And I am truly grateful for not having to prep for another test.

The truth of the matter is, testing matters less and less through the increasing black belt levels. At that point the changes are more internal, more subtle. So I wondered what it was that Sensei was seeing in me, now, that would lead her to promote me. After all, I had only just finished my first year back in training after a near decade-long absence.

I thought about the changes I had gone through in the past year. First my physical struggles just to get through a class without dissolving into a little puddle of sweat and failure halfway through. And then my mental struggles, as my brain stuttered and shook like a Briggs & Stratton lawn mower engine trying to fire up on last year’s gas. I had to regain all that I had learned before, and put it into operation into this older, creakier and more dense body.

And I remembered when I felt that odd change occurring, those weeks when all of a sudden, everything started to move more smoothly. My focus changed, from the attack to the attacker, from their hands and feet to their face and eyes and even beyond. Recalling the advice that Takuan Soho, the Zen monk, had for his swordsman friend, the scion of the most famous sword school in feudal Japan: Let your mind rest on nothing, lest it be captured by your opponent. I was open, fully aware, and — and, well, feeling competent, for perhaps the first time during my life in the dojo.

It was about then that Sensei had me substitute-teach a few classes, and another awareness began springing into being. An understanding of things that I only got as a teacher, as I broke the techniques into components so I could reassemble them to teach in class. As I did that, my understanding of the techniques deepened in an unexpected way, and I could see all of the variations spinning off from the basic form of each. Now, when attacked, I am suddenly presented with a wealth of choices, an endless array of responses. I see them. They’re there, waiting for me.

When I first came to aikido, my only response to any conflict was a loud and aggressive “NO!” But as my skills grew, that simple angry word grew to a more complex response, something like “Left, right, or down.” Now, my vocabulary of conflict is a sentence that speaks not only of my response, but of my attacker’s aims. And, best of all, I have the response of no response: The strike that neither hits me nor slows me, as I walk past it, letting go of it as soon as it occurs.

Perhaps those are the changes that Sensei saw that impelled her to promote me. I’ll never know. It’s not something I would ask her.