I trained very seriously in martial arts for almost two years. I quit a year and a half ago for various reasons, some of which will become obvious later in this post. Last week I casually sparred with an old training partner. I went in knowing he would, by any objective measure, be the winner of a fight between us. He’s bigger, preternaturally talented, won every fight back when I was training actively, and has been training very seriously since. But I didn’t care, and the sparing exceeded my expectations- I got a few shots in, I took hits well, and it turns out most of his growth in the last 1.5 years was in control and teaching, so in many ways I actually felt like my actions had a bigger impact on the outcome of our fight than I did before. It was a huge success.
Off the mat, a bystander (not affiliated with my old dojo), complimented me, which was kind of him. I forget exactly what I said, but I referred to my friend as “better.”. The bystander cut me off.
“Don’t say that. If you think it it will always be true.”
Ugh.
I know this is well meant. And I know that perception can affect outcome. But American martial arts have such a strain of bullshit around this that I want to wash myself of the whole thing. There’s no shame in being worse at something than someone. There’s no shame in being worse than a particular person at a lot of different things. It would, in fact, not be the end of the world if my own pessimism led me to perform slightly worse at a hobby I no longer pursue, whose benefits were never skill acquisition.
I resent the suggestion that I could be a ninja if only I just imagined it. Or as my ex-dojo would say, committed to it. It was used to excuse people who hit way too hard or otherwise violated safety norms- “it only hurts so much because you’re afraid of it.” It may be true that it would hurt slightly less if I had less fear- but that’s not the same as saying it wouldn’t hurt, or that the pain/physical risk would be low enough to be acceptable to me.
Top Dog says that people work harder (and learn more) when put in competitions where victory is imaginable, but far from certain. I suspect that people who say these things are trying to induce me to work harder by suggesting victory is achievable. It doesn’t work on me in this case, because I’m convinced I have logic on my side. Even if I’m wrong, their attempts to negate the belief reinforce it, in mechanisms very similar to the one they claim is holding me back. It is, at best, trying to tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools.
What I would prefer is to find ways to be able to give my all (or whatever amount of effort and attention I deem optimal) regardless of my perceived chance of success. That strikes me as a much more worthy, and sustainable, endeavor.
While I’m on the subject, I am also tired of medium-to-large men telling me any strength differential can be overcome by sufficient skill. It’s technically true for a broad enough definition of the word “skill”
but it still lowers my estimation of what the speaker could teach me.
Aceso Under Glass 