Friday, October 15, 2010

Rarefied Air

One of the most disturbing moments in the martial arts is when you suddenly realize that your instructors may not know what they are talking about. It’s not just in the martial arts, I see it other places too… and it’s also not just in my specialized field of real violence.

Probably the first suspicion, years ago, was in my first dabble with karate. It was a very strict traditional system taught by a junior shodan and an extremely cute brown belt at my University. At one point I asked about stances. The instructor said that they clearly weren’t for fighting, they were strengthening and conditioning exercises for your legs.

That made no sense whatsoever. Static conditioning is NOT good training for dynamic action. I didn’t have the words at the time, but I had this horrible feeling that he was just guessing.

The second instant was when I asked why we spent time on kihon and kata when sparring looked nothing like either. I’ve written about that before.

In other fields… recently, looking at marketing for Conflict Communications we’ve had some offers of help. Marc and I are both painfully aware that we aren’t salesmen and have no inkling of the process (there is a definite protocol to approaching certain groups.) It became painfully apparent that many of the ‘experts’ offering help had no more knowledge than we did. Often, all it takes to be a consultant is enough knowledge to make the clients feel inadequate, not necessarily enough knowledge to do the job. Lesson learned.

Then there are many things where the learning curve is extremely finite. You can stare at you navel for eternity, but skill acquisition and knowledge acquisition is time limited.

Do you stop learning then? Of course not. Maybe a better way to say it is that there is a limit to how much you can be spoon-fed. Taking in received wisdom, even from a reliable source (and those are rare in many subjects) becomes mutual navel-gazing quickly. Worse, it can become addictive.

Another conversation with Toby: “I took my first survival class when I was twelve and my last at fourteen. I already knew what I could be taught in a class. I had to go out and test it and think through it on my own.”

Toby also shared his system: go out and test. Try it out. Think it through, brainstorm. If you don’t have enough of a foundation, you pull back and research. If you can’t find an answer by research, then you look for a mentor.

Try-research-mentor.

Subtle difference between a teacher and a mentor, and I appreciate that Toby used that word.

People who have gone to the deep water or climbed the ‘path to the mountain’ have always been rare. Few communicate well. We make up our own individual languages for what we have seen and felt. It’s not a community with a common language that you can be raised in. And even the wisest don’t really know all that much.

It’s a big world, people. If I knew a thousand times more than all of you put together I would still be ignorant of almost everything in the entire universe… and each of you would know about things I don’t know.

Deep water or shallow, no one gets wet exactly the same.

Many paths up the mountain? There are many paths up many mountains. And someone else’s knowledge is at best hearsay to you. Learn for awhile, then play.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I needed this.

Thanks Rory!

Tiff said...

“I took my first survival class when I was twelve and my last at fourteen. I already knew what I could be taught in a class. I had to go out and test it and think through it on my own.”

I feel this way about my BJJ practice. I've been a ranked blue belt for years now, and at first I grew really frustrated with everyone whooping my ass, even the white belts. But then I realized the obvious: my opponents are almost always male and typically larger/stronger, so the frustration eased. And I've come to believe that a blue belt level of BJJ is all I need to know as far as that art is concerned -- anything more is just finesse and strategy and technique, none of which will save my ass from someone twice my size (which is most of the population, save for pygmies). After all, the world isn't a damn tournament.

Jonny said...

"The second instant was when I asked why we spent time on kihon and kata when sparring looked nothing like either. I’ve written about that before."

Rory, can you point me to where you wrote about this subject?

many thanks, Jonny

Rory said...

Jonny:
At least here:
http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2008/04/mr-rubber-meet-mr-road.html

Probabluy elsewhere as well.

Rory

Jonny said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jonny said...

(Deleted last comment as I wanted to add to it)

Thanks Rory, I read that blog. Very interesting and something I've said to students about sparring. Sparring and fighting to survive are too very different things. The pressure tests we do look nothing like sparring; there is no back and forth, it's anaerobic and fierce. But as you said, even that doesn't come close to the chaos of real violence.

I gather you are saying that kihon and kata if studied properly will help more with real violence than sparring ever would. I'm thinking of Iain Abernethy and his study/teaching of bunkai and how he relates that to self defence.