The lesson


2025 07 23    |    etc    no date    2024 +    2025    entries    home

Many years ago, I'd read that the samurai used to name their swords. I've never looked into it further to find out if it's actually true, but it's something I've kept in my mind regardless. Just like I keep in my mind what one sensei once told me about why he keeps using a cheap sword at his rank (though many level up) - because it shows the signs of his life on it. It's funny how things stick with you, impact you, hang on and colour your thinking. I used to think about it a lot, about naming my sword. But, much like all my tattoos, I figured that if a name was going to come, it'd come in its own time, in its own way, and when I am not looking.

I think it hit me today, the (potential) name of my sword. Or, at the very least, what it symbolises.

My sensei was talking to someone demonstrating about showing the (invisible) opponent confidence, regardless of how good or bad you are, or how you feel. That's very much part of the art, that confidence. It's not an aggressive one either. It's the confidence of quiet, of readying, and the readiness.

It was in that moment the (potential) name came to me, as I thought about the quietness, and how, despite how recently I've felt sad about my sword being a quiet one (during cuts), that that same quietness still teaches me lessons and reminds me of so many things. It is, by the by, quiet, my sword. I don't know why it's been making me feel a little blue that it is. But the quietness of the sword, the lessons, are all the ways iaido is quiet, or must be quiet. All the ways in which we avoid noise, the ways we encourage subtlety, silence, and lack of distraction. There is dignity in that, in your personal actions, and in the grace you give the opponent, the respect you give to your budo buddies, the giving of life as you quietly encourage your opponent not to attack, and in the taking of life when a samurai would assist with seppuku.

Some of the definitions of the word suit more than others, but I think they all hold true in some fashion or other:

  • Something that serves to suppress, check, or eliminate.
  • Release from life; death.
  • A final discharge, as of a duty or debt.
  • Final discharge or acquittance, as from debt or obligation; that which silences claims; (Fig.) rest; death.
  • A stillness or pause; something that quiets or represses; removal from activity; especially: death.
  • Final settlement (as of a debt).
  • Euphemisms for death (based on an analogy between lying in a bed and in a tomb).
  • A finishing stroke; anything that effectually ends or settles.
  • Discharge or release from life.
  • A period of retirement or inactivity.
  • Removal from activity (especially death).
  • Something that quiets or represses.


I'll have to sit with this for a while, but the word is quietus.

From the Merriam-Webster website:

In the early 1500s, English speakers adopted the Medieval Latin phrase quietus est (literally "he is quit") as the name for the writ of discharge exempting a baron or knight from payment of a knight's fee to the king. The expression was later shortened to "quietus" and applied to the termination of any debt. William Shakespeare was the first to use "quietus" as a metaphor for the termination of life: "For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, ... When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin?" (Hamlet). The third meaning, which is more influenced by "quiet" than "quit," appeared in the 19th century. It often occurs in the phrase "put the quietus on" (as in, "The bad news put the quietus on their celebration").

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