Letting Go of Victory

"Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser - in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough." The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume II, "Notes for a Law Lecture" (July 1, 1850?), p. 81.

I've tried to stop "winning" trials.

Before you contact the state bar association about my pending malpractice suit, hear me out.

I am a vigorous advocate. I speak with my clients, assess their situation, and act accordingly. If the evidence against them is overwhelming, I negotiate pleas with all the ethically sound tools available to me. If there is, however, some kind of illegality or insufficiency in the state's evidence, I will attack their case to the best of my ability. I will get irrelevant and illegally-obtained evidence thrown out. At trial, I will think long and hard about the weaknesses in the state's case. I will examine, cross-examine, and argue to attack those weaknesses as effectively as I possibly can. Meanwhile, I will take the strengths in my own case and find the best ways I can conceive of to sell them to the judge and jury.

But like I said, I've stopped trying to "win" trials.

This might make better sense in a Budo context.

A few nights ago, visitors came to our dojo. They were considering joining our class, so we had them sit and watch us train. Before we got going with proper class, I did about ten minutes of randori with my teacher. In my "family" of Budo, randori is free practice where I agree to give a committed attack, my partner agrees to either test that attack or use it against me, and we do this again and again until the conflict is resolved. My teacher is a godan (fifth-degree black-belt) with over two decades of martial arts experience under his belt. I've been at this for about five. Needless to say, he's much better than me. When the two of us do randori, I fall down a lot.

The visitors watched my teacher and I train. I heard one of them comment, "Man, that kid is losing all the time!"

After five years of immersion in our system, that characterization of our situation sounded almost alien. Here's how I viewed it.

I had an opportunity to practice my ukemi (attacking and receiving - mine needs a lot of work), feel my teacher's technique (which is a significant education unto itself - martial arts have to be absorbed through actual, hands-on experience), and try and sharpen and clarify my intent. All while his throws taught me where my technique was deficient.

In sum, even if I don't put him on his ass once, randori with my teacher is one hell of an education. It is good for me, and it is essential in my training process.

It also helps him. His learning my deficiencies helps him teach me better... I also tend to show him a few of his own bad habits, because my ultimate goal is to keep causing him new problems to solve.

The ultimate result of such exchanges is that both of us benefit enormously. That is why randori is an absolutely critical part of our training. It is also why the idea of me "losing" when I fall down a lot sounds so strange. In light of all the mutual benefits I discussed above, did anyone really "lose" anything? I don't think so at all. In fact, letting go of those "winning and losing" attitudes is essential to successful Budo training, in my opinion.

But back to my pending malpractice lawsuit.

From what I wrote about, you might accuse me of trying to "win" trials, what with my researching, cross-examining, and arguing. But I think that trial advocacy, like Budo, works best when you put aside winning and losing. There is a reason for our adversarial system of justice. Men and women, far wiser than me, realized that one of the best ways to find the truth was to pit two intelligent, motivated arguers against each other. That way, like two people in randori, they could show each other the strengths and weaknesses of their case.

The ultimate goal, however, is not "winning" or "losing" a case. If your spirit is pure and your mind is right, the ultimate goal of any trial is to find the truth. That's what the adversarial system of justice was designed to do.

Therefore, if I pointed out all the weaknesses in the state's case, and they still had sufficient proof for a conviction at the end of the trial, I did not lose. I did my job as part of the greater engine of finding truth that is our justice system. Likewise, if I exonerate a client, I haven't "won" anything. No more than a distributor cap "wins" when it works in harmony with spark plugs in a car.

Where the idea of the criminal justice system gets perverted is when attorneys let their ego dominate it. Dirty tricks and sharp practices come out. Totally unnecessary litigation and "stall tactics" come out to see who can win wars of attrition. It becomes about personal glory for the attorneys, be they criminal defense attorneys or prosecutors. It also becomes about the money. A mercenary mentality develops which is totally alien and antithetical to that "mutual benefit" concept that I believe must be at the beating heart of Budo and law. And the people that it hurts? Those poor people who simply came to the criminal justice system in search of truth.

Therefore, I try and effect a change. Set an example in the court room. I've stopped trying to win cases. Now I just do my job (truth finding) as best as I possibly can.

The "Blame Game"

I'm showing one of my training partners the concept of "advancing retreating". He attacks me. I let the inside of my forearm get heavy on his wrist as I drop my weight to the rear corner. As he recovers his balance, stepping into the "hole" I just made for him, I smoothly put my open hand in his face, drop my center, and set him on his butt.

At least, that is what's supposed to happen. Touching his forearm and dropping to the rear corner go fine, but as I reach up to put my hand in his face, I accidentally poke him in the eye. No ruptured orb or anything like that, but he tears up, and his contact lens moves north for the summer.

"I'm sorry, man."

"It's okay," he says, while rubbing at his eyes, "You didn't mean to do it."

"Oh, I know I didn't mean to do it. We would have a seriously unhealthy relationship if I meant to do it. But I still have to take responsibility for it."

This little anecdote lays plain one of the big axioms in my "family's" budo practice: take responsibility for your entirety. Everything you do.

That little bit of Budo hard-wiring caused me quite a bit of anxiety the other day at work. I got a call from a Sergeant over at the jail. He advised me that an inmate had been sitting there in limbo for way longer than he should have. He had no court date, and the only thing holding him in was a trespass charge. This inmate didn't speak English, which probably accounted for the three months it took for this to get noticed by the jail.

Now, to give you an aside about the criminal justice system, there are only two times that a person shouldn't have a court date: when the state has dropped the charges, or when the matter has been totally resolved. A defendant should never leave a courtroom with an unclear picture of when his next court date is, if he is supposed to have one.

And yet, this fellow simply sat in jail with no concrete idea as to when his charges would be addressed again.

I investigated the matter. I looked into the court file for the individual. The whole thing was a complicated mess. I ended up having to call nearly every entity involved with this guy's criminal case: the state attorney's office, the clerk of court, the judge, and the inmate's former public defender.

The uniform response I got from nearly all of those people frustrated me. When I pointed out the issue of this stuck man with his phantom court date, nearly every person I talked to immediately responded with a defensive analysis of how it "wasn't their fault". Never mind getting him out of jail, fixing the problem, or making some sort of repair to the processs... that "it ain't my fault" was the first thing I heard.

Let me go back to the Budo anecdote. Both of us knew that I didn't mean to poke him in the eye. But, in that instance, I had two options with two outcomes. First, I could have said "I didn't mean to do it" and tried to abdicate any responsibility that way. In a sense, this is kind of true. I did not have the conscious intent to poke him in the eye. But if I chose to resolve the issue this way, I would have had no motivation to take conscious control of my actions and practice safer in the future.

If, on the other hand, I said, "This is my fault," I've now embraced the opportunity to take responsibility and improve my practice. By taking responsibility, I've increased my motivation to get better and practice smarter.

Look at it another way. If I'd stuck to "it ain't my fault", I would have surrendered that little bit of my autonomy. In our "family", we do our best not to let people do that. The idea is to become totally autonomous by accepting total responsibility.

Going back to my legal woes. That idea animated my sense of frustration. I'm not going to give you the full legal analysis, because it isn't really relevant to this piece, but the bottom line is that it was partially everyone's fault that this guy slipped through the cracks. The system is a big, complicated one, with a lot of potential for failure.

But everyone could have done at least a little something to be more careful. (You'll note that I include my office in this admonition. We can always improve our methods of tracking incarcerated individuals.) When I heard all these people launch immediately into how it was not their fault, I saw them all giving up the opportunity to evaluate their job, and see how they could do it better. By abdicating responsibility, all of them forewent a very powerful lesson in the effects of hastiness and sloppy effort. Without this lesson, they will not have the opportunity to improve.

In my opinion, the only way to lose the "blame game" is to play in the first place.

Whaddaya Want?!

As you might guess by reading this blog, martial arts have a near and dear place among the chambers of my heart. Were you to look at my schedule, you might not think the same thing. I get to the dojo once a week and spend a little bit of time every day practicing.

I've been thinking a lot about time and martial arts practice, and I thought I'd discuss it here.

My training time allotment is quite different from most of the true masters I've examined. I'll pick the arguable progenitor of my own art, because he serves as a pretty good example. People often talk about how Ueshiba Morihei seemed to have a level of skill so high it bordered on magic. They speculate about his what sort of cosmic energy he may have tapped into, or what sublime mind-state he might have reached.

Like a good criminal lawyer, my speculations range more to the mundane. From many reliable accounts, the man trained every day for somewhere between three and five hours. He maintained this practice for the better part of forty years. That investment of time seems to me like a much more likely explanation from his skill than divine blessing from the kami.

(Mind you, the man might have played checkers with the kami, for all I know. I don't know, I can't prove it, so I don't bother speculating about it. I focus my study on the things I can understand. Look elsewhere for theological arguments.)

There seems to be a cult of "genius worship" that exists in martial arts and other fields. There is the myth of a person that is somehow innately able to perform certain tasks with the greatest of ease. These are special people. They are "born with it". While there might be some truth to innate predisposition, I favor Mssr. Einstein's quote (really a ratio) vis a vis genius, perspiration, and inspiration.

If you examine the entirety of human endeavor and isolate the "gifted people" in a variety of fields, you'll find one common thread: large investments of time. What I ask the genius worshippers is simple? How much of their skill can be attributed to the right confluence of genes, culture, and opportunity? And how much is the bi-product of years and years of loving, difficult, and often painful devotion?

Of course, if my theory is right and genius does consist mostly of perspiration, that doesn't decrease the admiration due to those we label "genius". Hell, you've got to admire that work-ethic and the spirit of sacrifice. Giving that much of oneself and one's life to a specific endeavor is very difficult and, in my opinion, highly admirable.

All those hours Ueshiba spent training, he wasn't playing with his kids, having backyard barbecues, or working as a Public Defender.

But that gets us back to me. Despite my above theory, I don't plan on making any huge modifications to my practice schedule. Due to a thankful employment opportunity, I will be able to get to the dojo two or three times a week, instead of once, but other than that, things will stay the same. Just a half-hour to an hour on the off days, with occasional forays into blogging.

Why? Because I know what I want. I don't want to be a martial arts genius. I don't what my name uttered in hallowed whispers. I study aikibudo for three reasons:

1. To become a better person and get along with my fellow man.

2. To have a realistic and effective method of self defense, given the hazardous nature of my clients.

3. To have fun with my friends.

That's it. You'll note that attaining genius status wasn't on that list. I respect the hell out of people who study this with the goal of reaching sublime and epic levels of skill, but that just ain't me. The only thing I want out of the bargain is a good life. And since my good life includes aforementioned barbecues, children, and public defending, there just ain't the room for aikido genius.

That's fine.

Blessings in Disguise

My school has a very successful trial team. They practice hard. They “scrimmage” with other law students often. They keep a very unified front (walking in a tight formation, wearing the same suits… imagery reminiscent of military discipline). These practices allowed them to dominate the trial competitions for a number of years.

Their dominance has started to wane in recent years. Other trial teams are taking their tactics and using them, making the techniques used to defeat them into their own tools.

I recently heard one of our current trial team members bemoaning this phenomenon. Without thinking, I told him that I would have considered his circumstances a blessing. He looked at me like I’d grown horns and started spouting devil-speech. He quickly changed the subject and found a reason to go somewhere else.

In retrospect, it occurred to me that the thinking-model I embrace really is alien to our culture.

In my training, I’m eager to find the guy my techniques won’t work on. That’s where the art gets tested and made “real”. That is also where I am forced to analyze more deeply, understand, and push past my boundaries. I have to improve. I’ve seen arts where people never open what they do up to questioning. They never allow “outsiders” to test it. Often, in a subtle form of collusion, insular training partners end up lying to each other and “giving” each other unrealistic techniques. Often, they aren't even aware of this insidious deception. The result is that the art de-evolves and becomes useless (or, at least, not very realistic).

Therefore, the person who can effectively deal with my technique is a blessing: an opportunity to become better. This idea has been so repeatedly instilled in me that I sometimes forget that a large portion of the population doesn’t feel the same way.

Consider the real import of what the trial team member was expressing: what he really wanted was status quo and continued “winning”. That was more important than improving his advocacy skills, which is ostensibly what one would be doing mock trials to accomplish. It seems counter-productive, but the real inner mechanic is this: the utility of progress wasn’t worth the pain of having his short-comings made plain by his defeat.

The 90-degree turn our system of Aikibudo takes is that the ego is illusory. That “pain” which broke the deal for him, in our view, is simply the experience of having one’s ego burnt away as he comes to appreciate what he is really capable of doing. The pain is a closer communion with truth. If you’re in the business of survival, it becomes necessary to see things as they really are.

It’s a shame that the trial team here doesn’t feel the same way—I think they’d be better for it.

Grand Master Pat

I remember my perception of rank when I started training. Even my teacher didn't have a black-belt. I viewed someone who had managed to attain one as wielding an unearthly amount of skill. Surely, these men and women had dipped into a well of pure, unadulterated martial valor and come out total bad-asses. Attaining a black-belt, at that time, seemed like the absolute height of martial arts accomplishment.

In The Karate Kid, Daniel-san was a black-belt. That was a pretty high standard. I knew that I could not correctly execute the "Crane technique".

I certainly never envisioned myself getting the esteemed, magical apparel that was a black-belt.

Well, not too long ago, I got one. And if I've been dipped in any kind of well, it's the muddy well of ineptitude. I think I may have rinsed off in the brook of brutality and then dangled my feet in the lake of thuggish near-Aikibudo. Do you doubt me? Allow me to describe my shodan (first-degree black-belt) demonstration.

I'm a bit of a bastard. This is a description of both my character and my Aikibudo training. Instead of spending all my time under one teacher, I started under one teacher and then started studying under his teacher when I came to law school. As a result, I'd made it known that I really wanted my first teacher there when I tested for my black-belt, as well as my current teacher, because that first teacher means so much to me.

Well, I got my wish. My first teacher, Steve, made the drive down to Sarasota to get some hands-on time with his teacher (my current teacher, Jim). The two conferred with each other and determined that they should go ahead and get my test out of the way, since we were all in the same place. In fact, Steve (teacher number one) served as my uke for the demonstration of my skills.

Sensei asked that I show him the seventeen basic techniques in our curriculum. On the third technique, instead of placing my hand on Steve's face and lightly dropping him to the ground, I wound up and cracked him so hard across the head that I actually heard his teeth clomp together. I spared a look at Sensei as Steve (read: the victim) was getting up. Sensei was openly laughing.

On the fifth technique, I entered in, slipped behind, and dropped Steve. I was so amazed that I'd actually nailed the technique that I didn't get out of the way as he fell. His head whacked firmly against my knee. My knee hurt pretty badly, so I'm sure that his head felt even worse.

Through my unearthly skill, I'd already managed to supply him with welts on the front and back of his head. And I was just getting warmed up. Sensei scratched his chin and said, "That was about one-tenth Aikido and maybe nine-tenths just kicking ass..."

The rest of the kata dragged along painfully. It had been some time since I practiced the later techniques in the kata, so I'm sure they looked about twice as brutal as they felt. When we finished, Steve and I bowed to each other. He looked a little unsteady. A long moment passed. I kept expecting someone to say, "Patrick Songy... go home!"

Mercifully, Sensei opted for, "Patrick Songy... shodan."

He handed me the fabled garment. It was about half-again as wide as my old obi. He told me to go ahead and try it on. The room full of smiling people looked at me.

"Um, guys?" I said, "I'm wearing boxers under my hakama."

"So what?"

"Boxers with an uncertain escape hatch."

"Oh. Go in the changing room."

I went in the changing room, stripped off my hakama, and eagerly tied on the new belt. An unexpected complication occurred. Given the stiffness of the new belt and its width, the knot in the obi was absolutely huge. I'm talking an insane black orb of fabric with its own field of gravity, rotating just below my navel. I slipped on a pair of zubon (trousers) and sheepishly went back into the dojo.

I got a round of applause that slowly died out as they viewed the mass of my first-degree monstrosity hanging jauntily from my middle. My buddy Rob finally broke the silence.

"It looks like a weird budo-pregnancy!"

Laughter exploded through the dojo. A couple of my kohai (juniors) were guffawing with tears streaming down their faces.

"Boy," Steve said, "Who taught you how to tie an obi?"

With that, he stripped off my newly earned belt and tied it around his own waist to see if he could do better. His knot was no smaller than my own. He chuckled heartily, the blood rushing to his face and making his front-welt angrier. In response, more blood rushed to my face. The belt was then passed around the room to see if any of us could reduce the size of this mammoth belt.

I distinctly recall trying to will myself out of existence.

After we finished training, everyone got showered up and met our respective significant others at a near-by greasy spoon for a late-night celebratory dinner. We carried on like a big obnoxious family, mercilessly teasing each other and staying at the restaurant entirely too late.

Needless to say, my perception of various ranks have changed over the years. In our system, we routinely describe first-degree black-belt as a "serious beginner". Given my promotion to this rank, even that might be a stretch...

Omote

The sun sets on Boca Ciega Bay, creating lazy, golden sparkles on the rippling water. A few gulls above the water ride the warm breeze, which smells like salt. The breeze blows through the mangroves and makes their sun-warmed leaves slither together. Out on the pier, an old man and his grandson are casually flipping their fishing lines out into the water. A brown Labrador crashes through the dry grass that covers the hills. A teenage girl chases after him with a look of exasperation on her face.

Warm crushed oyster shells crackle under my feet as I shift my weight. As I breathe, my mouth forms the counts, barely audible among the relaxing sounds of the coast. The fading sun feels good, warming my tee shirt and the muscles under it. I expand and contract, my own movement breaking like a wave. As I go through the familiar motion, my muscles start to relax. That sense of never-ending movement fills my abdomen. The day’s tension rises off me like a burnt fog under the sun.

I easily slide aside as the Labrador and his ward careen by me, both of them smiling at the good nature of their dispute.

I feel genki. Life is good.

Click, clomp. My teeth smack together as an outstretched hand crashes into my face. As my feet leave the ground, I can already taste the blood in my mouth, welling up from my cheeks. Everything feels wet. My keikogi is soggy with my own sweat, which clings to me even as it drags the garment down and distorts its shape. My hakama seems to hang off of me, as if the cords holding it on are just as exhausted as I am. My moistened hair clings to my brow.

The top part of my right knee cries out in protest as I get up, its familiar pain adding irritation’s heat to my already exhausted mind. This isn’t the rolling, steady, and orderly practice I’m used to. It’s violent and chaotic. It is the maelstrom of a sinking ship on a stormy sea. It feels loose and sloppy. My mind doesn’t even have the time to think about what people watching might think.

I can only think about one watcher, the one who stands above me with a slightly raised hand. His eyes are alight with the same uncertainty and excitement which doubtless fill my own eyes. His unshaven jowls work as he shifts his weight, readying his next assault. His heavy shoulders tighten up and swell unconsciously. I find myself looking at the symmetry of his close-cropped haircut.

The dojo stinks of sweat and mold. The gray walls match my mood. The mats, pulverized by countless feet, have attained the consistency of a rotten pumpkin, albeit not the texture. The whirring ceiling fans give the fluorescent light an odd strobe effect. The venerable plywood under the mats creaks as I gain my feet. For the briefest instant, I look in the mirror on the far wall and see the two of us, figures slumped from fatigue but somehow still energized and taut, like guitar strings wound almost to the point of breaking. I find myself wishing that I was somewhere else.

“Matte."

The word is deliverance for us both. The edge recedes. We bow and then we shamble into a hug. For a moment, this rough, large man and I just hold each other, still uncertain of all the things going on within us. Not an embrace as an empty form, but rather as an expression of mutual beingness.

I feel genki. Life is good.

Home, Sweet Home

Over my years in Budo, I’ve trained in some strange places. I’ve trained in hot tubs and on piers. I've trained in the park. I had a regular weekly training session in my living room for a while. I've even had some fairly meaningful Aikido exchanges at an electronics store. But perhaps the strangest place I've ever trained was the first dojo I ever encountered on the University of Florida campus in Gainesville. Whenever I start complaining about my current training environment, whatever that is, I think back to those early years and everything instantly seems better.

My roommate and I almost didn’t attend our first class because the building is called the “Women’s Gym”, despite the fact that it hasn’t been exclusively used by women in at least thirty years. As we stood outside, I envisioned scenarios with screaming women clad in towels and University police hauling us off to wherever they detain the campus perverts. My roommate had a more pragmatic view.

“At least we’ll get to see some boobs before they haul us off.”

It’s hard to argue with logic like that.

Preparing myself for breasts, custody, or both, I walked into the foyer of the old gym and found that it was incredibly ancient. The building was a massive brick structure with an arched ceiling. Pipes ran along with walls and a massive set of stairs lead up to the main floor. A thick layer of dust covered everything. In a strange moment of insight, I realized that this building must have originally been a church that was bought by the university as it expanded, and summarily converted into a gym. (Later research showed my hunch to be on target. My roomie and I would jokingly come to call it “The First Church of Pain”.)

My first view of the actual practice area was overwhelming. The area had originally been a basketball court. Figuring that basketball and martial arts are practically the same thing, the University had simply covered the entire basketball court with tatami mats, resulting in the largest padded practice area I have ever laid eyes on. It’s a shame there were only four of us. I recall sessions of randori (free practice) that turned into running battles. I think we even had a few fast-breaks.

The large surface area was nice, but the actual substance of the mats was not. I suspect the padded mats were at least three decades old, and had subsequently lost any pliability they might have once had. The half-century old oaken planks below the mats might have actually been softer. I know that at one point in time, after a number of cocktails, I took a few falls in a concrete parking lot and didn’t feel any appreciable difference, except that the concrete was a bit warmer.

If the petrified mats weren’t bad enough, they were covered with one of the largest pieces of canvas I’d ever seen. This canvas was just as old as the mats and it was coarse beyond belief. I recall getting home from the dojo on more than one night feeling like a struck match. Those mats rubbed feet, elbows, and sides raw without discrimination. My girlfriend even had a brief bout of fear that I was suffering from some sort of weird dojo rash which would infect her and ruin her beautiful looks. It took the intercession of a doctor friend to convince her otherwise. (“He doesn’t have a rash, he’s just scraped up and dumb.”) She could accept that.

To make matters worse, bloodstains spotted the canvas. Given its dimensions, the canvas wasn’t something that you could replace, or even launder easily. So the university opted not to do anything. Blood stains (and God knows what else) kept accumulating. By the time I started training on that canvas, I couldn’t help but wonder if UF had ever hosted a “Live Dueling with Guns” Club on that very canvas.

I didn’t want to join, but to this day, I’d pay hefty cash for their club tee-shirt. I can envision it now: “Murder with guns for fun! UF Live Dueling with Guns Club – 1979”

The dojo had a uniquely cosmopolitan feel, despite its age. Along with our Aikido class, a different tradition of Aikido trained there, a karate group, and a judo club. There was no shomen, per se. Pictures of the traditions’ respective founders were placed on opposite walls, resulting in a recreation of the “Mexican standoff” popular in Spaghetti Westerns, with venerable martial arts masters scowling at each other from across the basketball court.

I suspect there’s no surprise in revealing that there was no temperature control in this building, absent a couple fans that worked only when they felt like it. When my roommate and I tested for our first belts, we were so hot and sweaty that we couldn’t hold onto each other’s wrists without slipping off. I’ve worked up some serious sweat doing martial arts before, but in that place, we’d walk out looking like someone threw a bucket of water on us. I lost ten pounds in the first couple months of training, and those that know me can testify that I really didn’t have a lot of extra weight during undergrad.

It’s unfair to say that everything about this venerable dojo was bad. On one side of the building was the real gym. There are a lot of beautiful women at the University of Florida, and consequently there were a lot of beautiful women in that building. In the middle of practice, your partner’s eye would sometimes catch a young, fit woman in her early twenties exercising on the cardio machines and consequently, in the middle of a technique, he'd would get a dreamy look on his face and disengage. Then you’d deck him as he stared into the distance. After he recovered enough to explain what put him into dream-land, practice would stop for a minute while we took in the sights from the window and soberly debated their merits. (Did I mention that we were an all-male dojo at that time? Painfully so?)

My first dojo serves its purpose, however, so I can’t be too ungrateful.

Everyone that’s been doing martial arts for more than ten minutes has a story about how it was tougher in the old days. (“We chewed nails and practiced aigamae ate in a ring of cobras.”) I suppose that gymnasium-basketball court-dojo is mine.