Recently I was chatting with a local martial artist who has been doing kick-block-punch type stuff for longer than I've been alive! Great guy! Unassuming fellow. Very interesting to talk to about a lot of subjects. This fellow seemed like the epitome of a long-time martial artist.
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That same day I'd been talking to a patient of mine that had been on Okinawa in the military during the Vietnam conflict. He was talking about signing up at the local villiage dojo to do some karate. He said that the class was taught by an American and whenever anyone would come into the dojo this 'instructor' would start out their program of instruction by kicking the noobie around the dojo for a while, generally abusing the hell out of him, and demonstrating how much he knew and how little the noobie knew. Well, my patient had been forewarned and when the instructor approached him for the first time, my patient told him right off the bat, "You'd better not try that because either you'll have to kill me or I'll find a way to whip your ass if you treat me that way." I don't think they had a very long or fruitful martial arts relationship.
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Anyway, I got to thinking about the contrast between these two people - The American karate teacher on okinawa and the 40 some-odd year local karateka.
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In the martial arts, there are tortoises and there are hares. Sprinters and endurance runners.
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Seems to me that the natural athletes that do martial arts in sprint-mode and use it as a way to place themselves above other people in a hierarchy of pain - those folks either burn out or get so broke-up that they stop after 5-10 years. But a lot of the folks that are lesser athletes, or that have to struggle to integrate the principles the folks that couldn't care less about the rank or the hierarchy - those folks go on to be the life-long budoka...
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... and incidently, those are the guys that end up becoming the master teachers of the next generation because of the extreme attrition of the sprinters and the assholes.
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Tortoises and hares, sprinters and endurance runners. I aspire to be the endurance-tortoise type martial artist.
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Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com
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Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com
