“This is not exactly keeping things REAL is it”?
THE DARK SIDE OF “LET ME GET MY HEAD AROUND IT”
Have you ever heard the term… “I just could not get my head around it”?
What do you think it means?
We have spoke about this many times, essentially it is only what is in our Heads that can come out of our Hands, and of course, this is training.
But what are we putting in our heads? There is a dark side that is always present and often unseen.
I was recently watching a T.V. Show that was set in the late 70s England, at one point a young man was in a situation with three skinheads that turned on him and gave him a sound beating, nothing new there, back then that was pretty normal. But the young man on the wrong end of this thing did nothing to protect or defend himself, he did not even attempt to flee the scene, he just got the shit kicked out of him.
This triggered a memory from my Sifu’s school about 15 or 20 years ago, bear with me on this, it needs a bit of a back story for context.
My Sifu had a very large school, in Sydney alone there were 14 sub-schools, with approximately 50 teaching personnel of varying levels from Branch [Sub-school] leaders, Branch Instructors down to assistant Instructors, even my Sub-School, which averaged around 15 students, had 4 teaching members.
To prevent the school from turning into a complete MacDojo all Instructors needed to attend Wednesday evening training under Sifu’s supervision, and as a Senior Instructor in the School one of my duties was to mentor a certain group of these Instructors on these Wednesday evenings, usually Non-Asians from the branches in the Western Suburbs, which was and is the working class part of Sydney.
Yes, this was racist, but it was not meant to be disrespectful, Sifu had always thought that Westerners thought and processed information differently than Asians, that Westerners preferred hitting things to doing FORMS, and on top of this that people from Western Sydney were an individual sub-set to the rest of Sydney.
In practice, what I did amounted to no more than translating Sifu’s polite words into ‘MACHO’ language and roughening up the edges of Sifu’s descriptions.
This one evening I noticed a small group of guys not exactly getting enjoyment out of the training, so I went and asked if I could help, there was a little bit of indecision, and then one of them piped up “This is not exactly keeping things REAL is it”?
My attempt to persuade them that Forms, especially Chum Kiu, were important fell flat so I asked what they would like to do instead.
Long story short they said they did not know what to do because all we taught them was “Limp Shit that does not work on the street”.
I said “O.K. let’s fix that, attack me and then we will start from there”.
They declined and said it was pointless because as a Senior Instructor I would know what to do and do it easily.
I was a bit lost with this comment, and in hindsight did not make the best choice, I said, fine, I will attack you, and if it fails, we can work from there.
There was a bit of indecision and looking from one to the other, and then one said “Let’s do it, but do what a street thug would do, just do not hurt me”, we all laughed, and I agreed.
I realised I was potentially setting myself up to get ‘regally’ embarrassed and punched in the head, but I had painted myself into a corner.
I decided on starting with a distraction, so I told the guys how I thought I could be biting off more than I could chew, to which they all laughed, and while they were laughing I gave the volunteer a huge double handed push in the chest that sent him flying into the wall, I immediately followed up by grabbing him by the throat and pinning him to the wall while posing a hammer fist with the other hand.
As soon as I grabbed his throat I knew things had gone to shit, the guy just went limp, the colour drained from his face, his eyes became glassy and he offered no defence.
I immediately let go of him and turned to the other guys, asking what had gone wrong, luckily no-one appeared to notice what I had noticed, and the conversation was about how fast it had been and how they had not even seen me move.
I was in my early 50s at the time and told them that it was not that I was fast, this allowed us to steer the conversation into preparedness, distances and awareness.
If it had been a real situation, that young Instructor would have just stood there while I pummelled him unconscious.
I told them that “KEEPING IT REAL’ was more about thinking fast and paying attention, about understanding that this guy you are now talking to is not interested in talking to you, he is trying to slow your mind down, that “KEEPING IT REAL” was to understand that this guy wants to hit you, and if you are close enough he will hit you, and that you may not even see it coming.
Things settled down and we did a bit of work on entering and exiting, on transitioning from defence to attack, and hopefully I demonstrated how the Chum Kiu Form helps us control the distance between the two protagonists.
But what did alarm me was that in the conversation they implied that by teaching advanced defences against complex attacks all we did was paint a picture that the attacker was a skilled and difficult opponent.
I could hear the ‘Dark Side’ softly breathing in the background.
Are we teaching ourselves to be scared, are we failing to see that the Bad Guy never gets any better than he was on our first day of training.
If we do not remind ourselves that we are the ones getting better, we are the ones training and preparing it is so easy to slip towards the DARK SIDE and not even know it.
The BAD GUY will not be getting better because, they are just Arseholes looking for an easy win, they will try to distract and then hit when you are not looking.
Just as I had done to them.
Before they left, they came and thanked me again for the help, I just hope it stuck.
Even JEDI can fall.
Toughen the fuck up Padawan.
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 