This is pretty much my first long post. I pretty much wrote this as I was thinking it, and it shows, but I still like it.







So, I happen to be going through one of those “What the hell am I doing here and why” phases, and I got to thinking; why bother with the martial arts (you can probably guess, this thought came directly after particularly tiring session)? You can’t really use it in your daily life. I mean, not in a physical sense. If some idiot steals my bike and tries to ride off with it, I’m not really justified to hunt him down, slam him onto the grounds and armbar him (although the thought has come up). It isn’t as if in the event of, say, a school shooting, or a biochemical attack, or a bombing, I have that much more of a chance of surviving. Sure, there are techniques to disarm a gunman, or fight multiple people, but one has to think realistically; in modern times, with modern weapons, the martial arts are far less useful than a taser, or a gun.
I was shocked at what I saw on the news a few weeks ago, a man was gunned down for his wallet and it was caught on camera. It wasn’t a “dojo mugging” where the assailant walked up to him and pointed his weapon in a specific way to be grabbed out of his hand. The man was shot from several yards away, after which the mugger simply took the man’s wallet and left.
Now, to anyone who reads a martial arts magazine, and can stomach reading the ads, that last paragraph would sound like the precursor to a detailed description of how your art won’t prepare you for “the streets”, followed shortly by the introduction of a new and fantastic fighting method that will leave criminals cowering in agony, allow you to fight in the UFC after a few weeks, cure your baldness, increase the size of your you-know-what and let you pick up any women you want even though you lack any real social skills. It isn’t an ad, and here is no technique for that. There’s absolutely nothing you can do, no way to prepare for it. The only thing you can do about being gunned down for no reason is to either pray, or live in a way that you regret nothing when you die. In other words, the only things you can do are live, and hope for the best. It’s really in the hands of God, fate, chance, or whatever you believe in. There is nothing to fear because there is nothing you can do.
But it’s the fear that keeps us buying. The fear of mortality, old age, the fear of being alone, of being looked down upon. Think of all of these ads for hair regret formula, “male enhancement”, weight loss, cars, shoes, the food we eat, the beer we kill our brains and livers with; they all play on the fear of losing social status, being unable to find a mate, being a “loser”, as it were. All of these things we buy comprise what we consider our “self”, and when we buy these products we are engaging in a sort of “self defense”, or so we may think. These products are used as a means to an end, or more appropriately a series of interconnected ends.
Think of the old ATLAS ads that they used to print in the backs of comic books. At the beginning, when the scrawny young lad unable to defend himself against the larger bully, his sense of self-efficacy is diminished, to ad insult to injury, the larger bully “steals his girl” (I put that in quotations to highlight the deeply sexist nature of this concept). Why does this young lady not help her apparent boyfriend up afterward, or show any sign of concern, as I’m sure most women would in the case (or at least, I hope)? The answer lay in the purpose of the advertisement. The message is that if you don’t posses the certain qualities this product will grant you (in this case, muscle) you do not matter, you are worthless; your SELF is lower than the SELVES of those who do posses these qualities. In essence, he lost so nothing else about him matters. Of course, we all know the boy goes home and immediately orders the ATLAS method and within weeks, returns to defeat his former tormentor, and, now possessing the only quality that matters, he is able to win back the object of his affection.
This will sound like a truly idiotic question at first, but let’s ask ourselves, what at this moment, goes through the mind of the person in this ad. First let me say that the particular end he strives for is quite ridicules. Anyone who witnesses humiliation, is propositioned by the person doing it and responds with anything but a resounding “HAIYAL NAW!” can only end up with 6 kids by five dads and that oh-so-cuddly soft alligator skin you get from too much tanning, so it really doesn’t go through too much trouble for her. Besides that, let’s ask, what if he still doesn’t get the girl. Let’s say, this sand-kicking guy later explained he did what he did in order to really feel what Machiavelli was thinking, and the girl where a philosophy major looking for her soul mate, has the protagonist of the ad wasted his time?
If he did whatever it was he did to get bigger only for the purpose of getting bigger, then yes, he has truly wasted his time. He is left with both killer lats and crushing disappointment. This is because; his increased bulk is just that and nothing more. He simply takes up more space; that’s it. There is no meaning to it. He invested all of his attention not in the activity, but in a goal that was both unattainable and deluded. He used a means to the end of “improving” himself, instead of using the means as an end in and of itself, really immersing himself in it and letting the experience improve him.
This brings me to my point, practicing a martial art to defend myself is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but if I die defending myself, I don’t want my time to have been wasted. I practice and love Brazilian Jiujitsu because I can lose myself in it. I can start flowing from technique to technique and later realize I wasn’t thinking during that time. It isn’t every day, but there are time when I’m rolling with someone, and suddenly my grades don’t matter, the way I look doesn’t matter, what’s happening across the room or at home or in other peoples heads don’t matter, there is only the task at hand. Those moments are the reason I love martial arts and choose to stay with it. It isn’t the idea of becoming some sort of tough guy once I get my blue belt, or that if anyone starts something with me I can handle him (which probably isn’t true anyway). It isn’t the days I think I have bettered my self that matters; it is the moments that I am not there. It doesn’t care what I drive, what I look like, or where I work. It only cares about technique. It is not fickle, as long as I work at it, it cannot get bored and leave me. It is mine, I relate to it directly, and no one can disrupt it or take it from me. Kind of like a soul? That’s how I like to think of it, at least.

I just got back from class and I'm feeling pretty good about the progress I'm making this week. I'm doing alot better when rolling now that I'm focusing on passing my opponent's legs before anything else, rather than trying to thread my knee through and getting lifted into butterfly guard. I think I'm more patient in passing,n ow that I'm in a better mood.

Another thing; I don't know how I kept doing it, but rolling forward when people took my back landed me almost in full guard. I'm going to have to ask about that tomorrow. I hope we work on takedowns too. Starting in a standing position is fun.

I was going to write something else, but this is a lot more important. Most of the time, I take a lot of time getting to know people. I keep them at a safe distance, and I wait, always assuming that there would be a time when we would be closer, if it were to be. In never stop to think that maybe there is no tomorrow, either for me, or for the other person. Father Gregory was one such person. I remember the first time I stopped to talk to him, he was debating with a student, wearing his full black garb, and his hat. I believe he was debating whether the essence of something could be evil regardless of what it was used for. I would come to understand through speaking to him that he believed that everything was created good, and we could choose wrong or something could be used for the wrong purpose, but in the end, everything was created good. He people talking, in a truly animated and…just a completely alive way about his beliefs. He was a Russian Orthodox monk, and I fully believe his faith reached deeper than anyone else I have or will ever meet. I could never explain it like he did, but he believed in living and treating people as if the Holy spirit where there, all the time. It’s nothing I can explain, you’d have to be Russian Orthodox or blessed enough to have known the man, I suppose. I remember he was talking about the poverty in Russia and how if you had one piece of bread and another person had none, one would break his piece in half and give it to you. It just sounds like some new-age bullshit when I say it, but with him it was absolutly and said in an absolutely humble way. What I mean to say is that his Christianity was real. Like really real, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see that again. I just read a post by another friend that said he lived by his principals and that’s absolutely true, no matter what, I never say him stray from them.
What I really mean to get down on paper is that I felt really and truly blessed to have met him, and what he said, this real, pure Christianity he described, haunted me for more than a week after we spoke. He was a truly inspiring human being, and I have no doubt where he’s watching us from.