Miyamoto Musashi says a true martial arts master knows when to break rhythm. Sometimes, the predictability of a beat will lead to your defeat. If you want to best your opponent, take control of the cadence, and change it to your advantage.

In other words, think of sparring not as military cadence but as jazz rhythm.

Martial arts certainly has places where cadence and rhythm are both expected and required. If you were to break rhythm in performing a form, for example, you’d look incompetent and unready. But in sparring, rhythm can be downright dangerous. It can provide an easy opening for your opponent to strike you, and win.

This lesson can apply to our daily lives as well. Part of practicing wisdom means realizing when to break rhythm in our own lives and habits. Sometimes, we get so stuck in a pattern that we don’t realize it has stopped being helpful. We’ve just done it for so long, we haven’t taken the time to consider whether it’s still working for us. (Maybe it never did.)

It also means knowing when to break rhythm from week to week, moment to moment. And this can be hard for those of us who really find comfort in consistency.

While I’m not one who loves routine (I revel in the jazz rhythm, to a fault, which has its own dangers), here’s how this showed up for me just yesterday. Over the weekend, I could feel that I have an excess amount of energy floating around myself. Which makes perfect sense. It’s been three months since I had knee surgery, and therefore three months of not being able to work out with much intensity. And it’s beginning to show. I can feel myself piling up this extra energy, and I know if I don’t figure out how to channel that in healthy directions, it’s going to spill out as impatience and frustration. I will take that energy and put it all as one big deposit into hustle culture. I’ll notice my words and conversations will be more demanding than gracious. More imposing than open.

So, I reconfigured my week. I am setting aside more time to work out in the hopes of burning some of this energy off. And I’m committing to a lot more meditation time, because I know from experience that if I don’t let that energy settle into centeredness, it will drag me all over the place instead. If I meditate, I can channel that energy into a sense of groundedness and purpose.

This week, what I need is to break rhythm. Change things up. Try some new things. All so I can find my way back to centeredness. Centeredness is not predictable. You don’t schedule it. You have to show up and create it, right here in the moment, over and over again. Centeredness is a jazz tune, not a military cadence.

There’s a deeper lesson here about wisdom, one that will surface often during this month of practicing the prajna paramita: wisdom is not rigid. It’s not a list of things you check off every day with certainty and a resulting feeling of smug accomplishment. It would be easier if that were true, but wisdom asks us to stay engaged. It asks us to pay attention and continue to notice where our energy is and how that’s working and not working.

Ninja wisdom means letting go of our schedules in favor of our soul-centeredness, even if it means reconfiguring what we’ve already planned. It means making sure our schedules work for us, rather than feeling like we’re working for our schedules.

Where can you be more jazz and less military cadence this week?