SLIDING SCALE.

A violent encounter is a form of ‘Culture Shock’, and the only way to deal with ‘Culture Shock’ is to accept, adapt and find the middle ground.

I recently read an article that claimed Western Intelligence is waning due to our avoiding reading over watching video.

Watching videos requires no mental interpretation, and as such, we are eroding our ability to convert words and IDEAS into mental images, as we all know our Brains love and live by mental images.

Just putting this out there, it has nothing to do with this post.

My Sifu’s school was an excellent place for beginners to engage with Wing Chun. It was orderly,  technically informed and above all, safe, but as you progressed to the intermediate level, very little changed in the approach, even as a Senior Instructor, the training was pretty much unchanged from the very first day we entered the school, still orderly, still technical, still informed and above all, still safe.

So, what is wrong with this approach?

Perhaps nothing.

It depends on why you are training in the first place.

My Sifu offered an approach where progress was measured by the ability to accurately copy what we had been taught and then to explain the established method of instruction to others.

This is an Academic approach to training, the system was a copy of organised education, a genuine SCHOOL.

As such, the end game was to progress from student to teacher {Instructor}, from teacher to professor, {Master} and finally from professor to recognised expert {Grand Master}.

It was an Academic approach where progress was measured by the ability to accurately copy and explain what we had been taught and to advance the established method of instruction.

This is in no way a criticism of my Sifu’s approach; he made it very clear that this is what he was selling, and as an Academic product, it was of a very high quality. We should be a bit more even-handed; this is the mainstream Martial Arts model of every style.

There were many occasions when asked about how we could use the training; my Sifu would say that it was up to the individual and how well they could transition the knowledge into practice.

If we step away from Martial Arts for a second, this is reflected in everyday life, it is essentially the tension between an Academic Expert and a Master Craftsman.

The value of each depends on context. If you wish to design a water delivery system, you would call a hydraulics engineer but when the pipes burst you call a plumber.

My Sifu turned out many quality Hydraulic Engineers.

How do we now become Plumbers?

ALL TRAINING IS INADEQUATE AS A METHODOLOGY.

Engaging with a violent and aggressive attacker is just about as far away as we can get from how and what we train.

But is it different?

If we revisit my Sifu’s comment that “ it was up to the individual and how well they could transition the knowledge into practice”, this implies that the information is already in the teaching and that once fully understood, there is nothing needed to add, nothing extra to learn.

I agree with this.

Once we see that most martial arts training is about training future teachers and not future fighters, it makes it easy to differentiate between what is an academic explanation and what is a practical methodology. 

But most importantly that they cannot be both.

Once we accept that all of our FORMS are collections of movements and not patterns of movements, and here again, that they cannot be both, we create fertile ground for hybridisation.

Training is inadequate when it comes to dealing with violence.

The difference between violence and training is not a difference of scale; it is not about being quicker or more physical or even more relaxed or more mindful, it is a difference of philosophy.

The difference is the WHY.

Neither is this a difference in identity; we are not trying to measure apples by oranges. Wing Chun is organised or systemic violence, and what the attacker is doing is, at least from our perspective, unorganised or non-systemic violence, but they are both expressions of violence.

A violent encounter is a form of ‘Culture Shock’, and the only way to deal with ‘Culture Shock’ is to accept, adapt and find the middle ground.

Ask any ‘Tradie”, and they will tell you that the answer always contains a level of compromise, that, like it or not, all work is done in the middle ground, which must work here and now while professors get trapped going over old blueprints, locked in their study looking for perfection, rapidly becoming irrelevant.

To be sure the best ‘Tradies” are the ones that know the most and compromise the least, but they still compromise.

Navigating a violent encounter is about capturing the middle ground, about compromise, about mixing what we know to be “RIGHT” with what we think is perhaps simply “NOT RIGHT”.

It becomes a sliding scale between what we know is ‘RIGHT” and what we know “WORKS”.

LEARN THE FORM AND THEN ABANDON IT.

LEARN THE WAY AND THEN ABANDON IT.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIND YOUR OWN FORM.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIND YOUR OWN WAY.