I go for a walk along a quiet road every morning for my physical health, and to amuse myself I carry a garden spade to liberate wild flowers from town mowers. Yellow, red, blue, maroon, they stand defiantly before the powerful tractors. What most consider weeds, I see as The Artist’s clock: each appears in its own timing through the summer for its brief sojourn in the sun. At home I plant them, and many of them survive.

I, too, have power over these diminutive creatures, but I can’t control them. They will decide if the spot I’ve chosen for them is satisfactory – if it’s not, they just die. And only they can decide how long they will bloom.

Off and on over the years, I’ve studied aikido, said to be the most spiritual of the martial arts. Under my first sensei, or teacher, the only spirituality was prayer for enough breath to endure sheer exhaustion. Sensei had worked as a bounty hunter, and occasionally he would tell us stories of the streets and how real life differed from the dojo. “If you can walk away from a confrontation, do it,” he said. “If you need to, run.”

He is a big, thick guy, and I’ve watched him throw 240-pound men through the air, but that was his experience of what works.

What is true power, then? As I discovered with the wild flowers, power is not control. Trying to control flowers, beyond loosening the soil and watering, leads only to frustration. It’s the same with people.

Janice Blair makes this point in her front-page piece on enabling. “You don’t plant a tree and then watch it around the clock, micro-manage its growth, try to talk some sense into it, plead with it or nag it if it’s not growing fast enough,” she writes. “Most of us don’t use force on our flowers. We care for the soil with water and fertilizer, make sure the sunshine is plentiful and it’s protected from the stresses of the environment while it develops its root system. We have the power to influence and mediate its growth, but we don’t have control.”

Steve Hauptman reinforces the point in his piece on control on page 15. Power, he writes, cannot be had by controlling others: “Start by shifting your focus from outside — people, places and things — to inside — your own needs, thoughts and feelings. Happiness is an inside job, and most of the answers you need are there.”

Richard, a good friend, completes the circle with his page one story of his own sensei, who counseled him as mine did me. Transferring that lesson to the mean streets of Brooklyn, however, was much harder than executing a neck lock on the next thug to wander along.

I began with my daily walk, and I’ll end there. When I was a kid, the teenager next door, a basketball and tennis star at the high school, coached me and my pals in whatever sport was in season. He grew up to be a nationally-ranked tennis coach, college professor, author of many books and an authority on sports medicine. So I asked Jim Brown how we who aren’t particularly fond of sweat can get ourselves out and moving — without, you know, too much sweat. What we’ve all heard, he writes on page 8, is true. Walking nourishes the body, but also the mind and the spirit.

Turns out that it’s not so hard, especially if you love wild flowers.

Terry A. Kirkpatrick