Blessings in Disguise

My school has a very successful trial team. They practice hard. They “scrimmage” with other law students often. 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.

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.