Learning To Be Silent

By Carl Frederick
Here’s a scenario for you: You’re in class, either learning a new technique or practicing an old one. And maybe the instructor tells you to “play around with it,” perhaps throw an atemi, or a counter, or this, or that. So you work at it with your partner. And then, the inevitable.

“Well, what if I do this?” your partner begins. “Fine,” you boast. “I’ll just do this.” Back and forth you go, and then, just as you think you’ve reached that pinnacle of transcendent awesomeness, your partner executes that ONE atemi, that ONE counter, or that ONE irimi.

And you freeze.

“What do I do now?” you wonder. Of course at this point you’re technically dead.

Game over. Thanks for playing.

You begin to question everything. You replay the encounter again in your mind, looking for the correct response.  “What if,” you wonder, “I had just moved there, right before he did that.” For some, the tendency is to become depressed, believing their entire technique is flawed. They may even look at other activities to fill their time. Knitting perhaps?

I’m exaggerating, of course, but there is purpose to what I am saying. Throughout my martial arts career, I have personally seen the foregoing play out, time and time again, either in myself or my fellow students.

Given my chosen career, for me “failure” means “death.” But as I have learned, and have tried to teach others, the martial arts are always variable. Always. No matter how hard you train, there will always be something that comes along, some surprise, that will inevitably screw everything up. You can mull over a technique for days, looking for perfection, but in the end someone always comes along to set aside your best laid plans.

A mistake I sometimes see is believing that some foolproof, perfect technique exists. I am at fault for this as well. But we simply cannot achieve this. There’s no one way to do something — sometimes you just have to do whatever it takes to make it work. I believe fully that the best martial artists are not the ones who are “perfect” in some abstract sense, or, say, have a playbook of everything that may happen in an encounter, or even those who create detailed backup plans in case their first backup plan fails.

For me, the most impressive martial artists are those who can adjust to new situations, and prevail. Even if it’s messy.

By Carl Frederick
For as long as I can remember, I have been involved with the martial arts.  I connected with it, and like a musician to his instrument, I seemed to have a talent which I was able to tap into.  I remember my master in Tang Soo Do, very early on in my training, explaining to me the power of martial arts, and in particular Tang Soo Do.  He stated that what we are learning was meant for one thing, and one thing only: war.  The techniques we were learning were tried and true battlefield tactics, and were meant to kill.  But we don’t live in feudal Korea; we live in a world that prefers movie flash to real tactics.  The fact remained, however, that what we were learning was deadly, warlike, and chaotic. 

Today, martial arts are a form of self-defense, meant to be used only in the most dire of situations, and not to be taken lightly.  I am equally amazed and scared by the things that I know.  But something that I have realized in my time in Aikido, was that my Tang Soo Do master was right.  Everything I knew was chaotic.  My attacks caused injury and pain, and possibly even death.  Even my ability to block incoming attacks had a chaotic motive.  Like an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force, there was no harmony or balance in what I did.  It was simple: defend myself against an attacker, and never take a life unless no other option was feasible.  Even then, I should try to find a way.

This is what draws me to Aikido.  I have a choice whether or not to cause injury, pain or death.  In this sense, Aikido leaves you no choice, its intent is harmony and non-violence.  There is no chaos.  I also like it in the practical sense of my career–it would look bad for a police force to have a cop roundhouse kicking felons.  So I like the immobilizing, passive defensiveness of the art.  But also, it makes me realize that I don’t need to cause injury to defend myself.

Granted, I still like my “harder hitting” style.  And yes, any time there is a technique on the mat that seems more brutal, I get a gleam in my eye.  Although I don’t believe in the whole idea of “bringing uke back into harmony, and making them one with the world,” when a sociopath is willing to kill me so much as look at me, I still believe in the principle of non-violent solutions.