Martial Arts

Caveat: If I sound like an expe­ri­enced author­ity on self-defense, you should know I’m not. I’ve only been attacked once in my life and then man­aged to talk my way out of it. The other parts of my per­sonal expe­ri­ence come from books, teach­ers and sim­u­la­tions. I actu­ally con­sider it a bless­ing not to be an expe­ri­enced author­ity on self-defense, as I like liv­ing a peace­ful, happy life where peo­ple don’t try to change my lifestyle for me with­out my permission.

Where a lot of mar­tial arts fail is in not address­ing the men­tal and emo­tional aspects of self-defense before, dur­ing and after the fight. Nobody gets attacked in a vac­uum, every­body gets attacked in a con­text. Nobody goes through a vio­lent attack with the same men­tal and emo­tional response they go through a kata drill. And nobody goes from nor­mal life, to vio­lence, then back to nor­mal life the same way again.

I trained for years with­out even once address­ing the men­tal and emo­tional response to being attacked, then I donned a High Gear suit and had a part­ner go at me high speed, strength and intent and expe­ri­enced the “oh fuck!” freeze for myself. It wasn’t as pretty as the kung-fu movies. Even though they were real fake train­ing sim­u­la­tions, I went through the whole gamut of sur­prise, shock, fear, lock-up, despair, anger, aggres­sion, indig­na­tion, all the while try­ing to defend myself phys­i­cally. Con­clu­sion? It wasn’t as easy as I thought it’d be.

And yet.

Most peo­ple think that learn­ing a mar­tial art teaches you self-defense. But actu­ally most mar­tial arts don’t teach you self-defense – they only teach you how to deal with self-defense fail­ure. That’s some­thing I real­ized only after prac­tic­ing mar­tial arts for nearly 15 years.

The Dif­fer­ence Between Mar­tial Arts & Self-Defense

Here’s an easy way to under­stand the dif­fer­ence between mar­tial arts and self-defense, and why one doesn’t always equal the other.

Sce­nario A

It’s 4 in the morn­ing, and you’re going home by your­self after a late night out. You won­der whether to take your usual short-cut through the back-alley. It’s dark and deserted, but you decide to anyway.

Halfway through, a man steps out and threat­ens you with a knife, demand­ing you hand over your wal­let. You don’t want any trou­ble so you hand it to him, but he lunges at you after tak­ing it. Your mar­tial arts train­ing helps you side­step the attack, dis­arm the man and throw him to the ground, after which you run like hell back home.

You reach home a lit­tle shaky, but safe. You real­ize you should have been more care­ful about tak­ing the back-alley earlier.

Sce­nario B

It’s 4 in the morn­ing, and you’re going home by your­self after a late night out. You won­der whether to take your usual short-cut through the back-alley, but it’s dark and deserted, so you decide to walk the well-lit and busier main road. You reach home safely, but a lit­tle late, and think you were prob­a­bly too para­noid earlier.

If imper­fec­tion is not wel­come then you will not be sta­ble when per­fec­tion fails.

When I read the post about per­fec­tion­ism from Shi­han Doug Wil­son, I thought about all the times I’d messed up a tech­nique in the dojo. And then I real­ized, I’d done more messed up tech­niques in my 10 years learn­ing Bujinkan Tai­jutsu than per­fect ones.

But Doug made me think that the golden moments weren’t those shin­ing rar­i­ties where I pulled off per­fect tech­niques. They were prob­a­bly those moments when I didn’t do a tech­nique prop­erly, but still recov­ered from it and kept myself safe.

Since real life is messy, maybe learn­ing how to do a per­fect tech­nique isn’t as impor­tant as learn­ing how to recover from an imper­fect one.

Or, to extrap­o­late into a Zen moment: seek not per­fec­tion, but the abil­ity to bounce from your imper­fec­tions and do it anyway.