IT IS WHAT IT IS, BUT WHAT IS IT?

“turn on, tune in and drop out”.

To understand Wing Chun, we need to understand or at least reconnect with something we have always known.

An aid to this end is to think like an Artist, not a Martial Artist, but an “Art” artist.

We need to be more like a playwright, such as Bill Shakespeare.

Or a visual artist such as Mark Rothko.

Or even better a poet such as John Keats.

It was Keats who coined the phrase “Negative Capability”…

for a writer to pursue a vision of artistic beauty even when it leads them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty, as opposed to a preference for philosophical certainty over artistic beauty.

J.K.

In many ways, this spins me back to the heady days of my misspent youth, to the hip ‘Harvard’ professor Timothy Leary who advised us all to “turn on, tune in and drop out”.

Every time we get astonished by some new information from our teacher, when we cannot believe we can do so much with so little we are in the universe of “Negative Capability”, and the citizens that thrive there.

What did these diverse individual entities such as Shakespear, Rothko, Keats and Wing Chun have in common?

The Human Condition.

The most amazing, and perhaps perplexingly disturbing thing about the Human Condition is that we are all born with it.

There is nothing to learn.

Just acceptance and understanding.

If we wish to understand Wing Chun, we must first understand what it is to be human.

We should work on this.

As always…

WORK ON YOUR WEAKNESS – PLAY TO YOUR STRENGTH.