THERE IS MORE TO IT THAN NOODLES.

Continuation is difficult if we lose sight of the original goal.

During ‘lockdown’ I have been in a running conversation on Whatsapp with our training brother and ‘INCa’ tribe member ‘Bo’.

He recently asked me a question that helped shape this post…

 “Hey master, I remember you talking about Bakers doing certain movements I was wondering if it’s the same thing with people who make things such as noodles rather than learning what they are making what is it that they are unconsciously learning”.

My answer…

“What they are learning is how to be themselves while making noodles”. 

With the end of lockdown finally in sight, this has a great deal to do with how we re-engage with the work.

Sadly, talking here about the global Martial Arts community, many people will not restart training and many others will be asking themselves why they should.

After the first N.S.W. lockdown our little outfit lost almost 50% of our people, mostly private one-on-one students, this will no doubt play out again, just hopefully not with our tribe.

There are many reasons people do not reconnect, but mainly it is because students forget why they started the training.

Continuation is difficult if we lose sight of the original goal.

Like all things in life, the original purpose was to solve a perceived problem.

What was that problem?

Has that problem genuinely disappeared?

Combat Sports players scoff at Traditional Martial Arts players by saying that we are involved in fear management and not danger management because we train for something that may happen sometime down the line {random violence} and not for an event that we know when and where it will be {organised fight event}.

This is of course a major reason we train in Traditional Martial Arts {which are at heart ‘Self Defence Systems’} as opposed to Combat Sports {that are flat out fighting systems}.

We are training to be prepared for a situation, not of our choosing, that we would like to avoid or at the very least get out of in one piece.

Despite this observation we are not learning how to fight or even learning how to defend ourselves.

We are learning how to be ready.

How to accept that somewhere, somehow, at some time, life will throw us a Bell Ringer or a Googly, and to be at peace with that.

All training in any discipline is training for peace of mind amid the chaos.

How to be the best version of ourselves we can be on the worst of days.

AND TO OWN IT.

That day is still coming.

Despite what I hope are the good intentions of misinformed teachers, we cannot expect the unexpected, but we can choose how to meet it.

All of my posts are intended to be the beginning of a conversation, not a definitive answer to this or any other problems.

Or at least that is the IDEA.

“The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.”– Socrates