I recently read Patrick Rothfuss' book A Wise Man's Fear. I really enjoyed the book as a whole, and I am not sure whether or not Mr. Rothfuss has ever done any sort of training in martial arts, but there were a number of passages that stimulated my martial arts thought processes.
In one of my favorite passages, one of the teachers at a university gets seven students together. Each of these students is brilliant, and accomplished in a wide array of academic fields. The teacher tells the students that he will, in thirty minutes, stand at a certain point and lob a ball with a certain amount of force. He asks the students to use their arts and sciences to calculate where the ball will land.
The students spend their thirty minutes furiously applying their various disciplines to the prediction of the ball's landing point. The thirty minutes pass and leave the students frustrated. The teacher asks the students if they have their answer. The students grudgingly admit that they cannot say for certain where the ball will land, despite their calculations. The teacher abruptly leaves the classroom and comes back in the company of an eight year-old boy.
Striding right to the spot he gave the students, the teacher turns and lobs the ball at the surprised eight-year old. The eight year old, somewhat started, catches the ball perfectly.
The teacher then turns to the students and asks them, "How is it that an eight year-old was able to predict in less than a second what seven of the brightest students here could not in half an hour?"
The answer, of course, is that the boy saw the teacher's movements, the ball, and its flight and was able to make all the calculations in the subconscious parts of his brain, and relay all that information to place his hands in the right place, at the right time, in the right shape to catch the ball. If he'd tried to process it intellectually, the ball would have hit the ground long before he came close to making all the right calculations.
This brings me to martial arts training. I am not so different from those students described in the book. I have a great deal of intellectual training. Doing things intuitively, by feel, is not something that comes naturally to me. That said, I do believe it is a necessary part of martial arts training.
Kata makes sense to me. The pre-arranged forms are designed to teach certain principles in certain ways. Things go as expected, and can be intellectually processed and analyzed. If something goes wrong, you can repeat the experiment, making little adjustments, until it works correctly. While it is intense, and emotionally challenging in its way, it is somewhat predictable work.
Randori isn't so simple. For one, if it goes south, you can't just stop and do it over again. You've got to live with whatever ugly thing you tried to give birth to. Instead of a small number of variables, like in kata, there are an infinite number of variables, compounded by a problem that is constantly shifting and changing (i.e. - your opponent). Instead of a steady trickle of data, it is a flood. Compounded by the flood of information is the strange way that randori seems to tap directly into all of your inner psychological clutter and allow it to flow up to the surface. In such an atmosphere, the odds on being able to intellectually process your way through a problem in half a second (which, in my estimate, is a realistic measure of how much time you have) are quite long.
I have spent years doing randori slowly, thinking my way through it. I certainly learned a ton from this practice, but I believe I made some faulty assumptions about it. I functioned on the assumption that if I did enough of this, I could learn to "think fast" enough to do the right thing in full-speed randori.
My efforts have been met with a lot of frustration.
Last night, my training partner and I tried something totally different. We agreed to do randori with no definite plan as to what techniques we were "looking for". If he attacked, I would just touch him, feel, and move with him. That was my only agenda. I didn't even care if I got him or not, or whether or not I made a technique.
And strangely... stuff just started happening. We relaxed, moved our feet, and tried to do it "by feel" instead of engaging our intellectual brains. We didn't care if it looked silly, or even if it worked. We kept hitting techniques, and found ourselves echoing the words of our teachers... "I don't choose the technique. You do. I just go with it and it happens." It felt so organic, so natural. And my brain didn't feel like it was trying to do the intellectual version of lifting a car. I could describe what happened (usually after the fact), but I didn't really plan it.
This is a totally different type of practice for me, and it wasn't easy. After a few exchanges, I would find myself trying to "do stuff" again... and I would have to catch myself and remind myself that I was doing it by feel and to leave my machinations at the door.
Regardless, I think exploring this might bear some interesting fruit.
