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Work and Reward

In less than a week, I will be back in the U.S. which is excellent. My training is winding down for the year, and my classmates are all getting excited about what they are going to do for their holiday this year. For me, I am heading back to Maryland again to find some work and make some money so I can continue my training in 2013.

With the new year approaching, the time is right to try to glean some lesson from the year past and look to the future. Here’s what I’m thinking now.

I think everything — everything — we do is like pushing a rock up a hill, like the myth of Sisyphus who was punished by the gods to eternally push a great stone uphill but never reach the top. But unlike Sisyphus, our existence is not punishment, and there is respite and there is success. If we push forward hard enough for long enough, we can reach plateaus or even peaks — where we can rest, gain perspective, and enjoy the easy downhill. But if we don’t push hard enough or stop too soon, our rock rolls back to the beginning and we start again.

Here at the kungfu school, we see this a lot as the holiday approaches. Every day we struggle to put home and rest out of our minds and get to work. If we knuckle down and push with everything we have, really focus, the training becomes its own reward. But stay distracted, and the whole thing feels like a waste of time. What you get out of training is dependent on what you put in, but there is a threshold that must be passed with effort before the reward appears. Each day of training is a little hill, and if we want to reach the satisfying down-slope we have to wrestle ourselves to the top first.

It would be, of course, easier not to push at all, and there is a time and place for stillness. But if we live, we must move. Here at the kungfu school, we have our teachers and Shifu to keep us moving forward. Life outside the kungfu school has forces that goad all of us onward. But those forces can only keep us pressed to the stone; we ourselves have to take responsibility for moving it enough to succeed.

There is an element of faith in this. There is a enormous rock in front of you and you can’t see the top of the hill or what is ahead. You have to believe that success or respite will be the reward for your work, or you will never find the necessary fortitude to face the apparent futility.

Also, one can not tackle every hill. There are choices to be made. We must decide which rocks to push up which hills. But since life will not let us stop pushing altogether, we are best served by picking one rock and one hill at a time and pushing until the reward appears. Trying to juggle too many rocks, or shoving at one rock but never sustaining enough to earn satisfaction, we become mired in futility and frustration.

In my mind, Sisyphus’s task was no more than any of us face. His curse was to each time succumb to despair, to forever lack the faith and the will to persevere to an invisible goal. But the future is unknown, so all our goals are invisible. I think that in truth, the hills we climb are never as big as we imagine, and the greatest part of our time working and living is spent trying to find in ourselves the determination to push through to the end. We all have to struggle on the slope, but we don’t all have to get stuck there.

I hate it when my blogs get preachy like this, but I write for myself as much as anyone, and sometimes I need to hear this stuff šŸ™‚

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The Fruit of Three Years

As of September this year, I have been training intensively in Wudang for three years. Full time training is such a luxury in one sense and such a burden in another. The opportunity to devote myself entirely to getting stronger mentally, physically, and spiritually is very rare and precious. However, everyday training quickly becomes like anything else — commonplace. It is easy to forget how lucky I am to be here doing what I am doing, and think only about the things I have given up in my devotion to this lifestyle. There are times when it seems I have given three years of my life, lost time with my family, spent all my money, and put normal growing up on hold for so long, all in exchange for just one thing to which it is much harder to assign value.

This past week has been a blessing in that respect. My master and many of my classmates went to Huangshan to the Fifth International Traditional Wushu Competition. I could not afford to go, so I had a week of much lighter training here at the school. It was a wonderful break after the past month plus, which has been filled with other performances and competitions. These are stressful because if there is a value in studying traditional martial arts, gold medals and looking good on a stage are not it. But in addition to a rest, my quiet week has reminded me of the treasures training has brought me.

For one thing, though the progress has been excruciating, I am indeed physically stronger than I was. And I have learned the value and the nature of hard work. For many years of my martial training, I watched those better than me with envy and despair. They made things look so easy. But three years of grinding repetition has made some things easy for me now. And I understand what it will take to reach the goals still before me; more work, sweat, grinding repetition, and above all, time.

Also, for much of the three years, Master has been pushing us to take more responsibility for our health. For years this frustrated me. It seemed like common sense to me that if I was exposed to a strain of cold virus to which my body had not developed immunity, I would get sick. Nothing I could do — just science, cause, and effect. Basic microbiology. How could I take responsibility for something like that? But this week I got a cold, and I knew even before IĀ  showed any symptom that I had slipped up and with my behavior undermined my own immune system. And I realized that for a long time now I have been using sensitivity I have learned here to monitor my body and do what I needed to do to stay strong and not get sick. And it had been a long, long time since the last time I was.

These are just what I’ve been thinking about this week, hard work and responsibility. I am sure there are other things I have also learned. S0, my three years in Wudang have not been entirely fruitless šŸ™‚

 

 

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Feeling like a Tree

It is definitely autumn here in Wudang now. It is getting cooler, and we just celebrated the Moon festival a little over a week ago. And here at the kungfu school, our daily schedule has shifted.

In the summer, our schedule clusters around the early morning and the late evening, with a long rest period and meditation in the middle of the day to avoid the worst of the heat. In the winter, our schedule gets very busy during the warmth of the day, but we get to rest at night when it is uncomfortably cold. This is one of the first things that I learned to love about our schedule here. One feels much more connected to nature when your daily life actually changes to fit it. Life feels good when it’s “dawn to dusk” and not “nine to five.”

Another aspect I am learning to appreciate more recently is the change in my body’s potential from season to season. In the summer, my muscles are long and limber. It is the time for swift growth and flexibility. Winter, my body gets compact and powerful. It is the time for strength and stoking the embers of the body’s vitality. This shift connects to our larger curriculum. Martial Arts is too varied and complex to practice everything you ought to practice all the time. But there is a time for everything, and so our training comes in waves. Flexibility, low stances, internal development, sparring, body conditioning, kicks, punches, cardio endurance, meditation — each wave comes in its own season. The discipline of martial arts is in maintaining each skill when you can’t focus on it, and seizing the opportunity when the time for growth arrives, like a tree in a tough climate. You can’t cut me open and count my rings, but you get the idea šŸ™‚

Summertime stretch test: Shifu's stick should not pass under my hips in the splits postion

 

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Martial Realism

This past week my class had a sparring session. These sessions take their toll– we spend the rest of the week dealing with the damage we’ve inflicted on each other. Personally, I had a bit of a headache from all the blows I didn’t quite block or dodge, and I sprained something in my hand in a bad punch, and a few other minor complaints. But the week of training reaffirmed my belief about the nature of martial arts in today’s world.

I personally fought two three minute rounds. I spent three and a half hours in a more-violent-than-usual environment, watching my classmate spar each other. That is a tiny fraction of my week, and an infinitely tinier fraction of my life. Someone who doesn’t train as I do might have an even smaller fraction of violence in their life. I think this ratio, violent life versus the rest of life, shows where our training priorities as martial artists should lie.

There are many martial artists that I have met who allow their training to interfere with their perspective on life. They spend so much time thinking about what happens in that tiny violent fraction that, first in their perception and then sometimes in their reality, that violent fraction swells. Violence fills their subjective reality, even if their objective reality is peaceful.

The day after we sparred, we got called away from the school to work on a silly performance thing (talk about a distasteful fraction of my life ;-p). But in the performance we were working with little 8-10 year olds. These kids were high-energy, full of curiosity about foreigners and eager to show off their elementary English and kungfu. Really, they were awesome. But with my head aching and my hand tender, and my annoyance at having to do the performance at all, I was immensely impatient with the little boys and girls. I couldn’t enjoy their exuberance at all.

But those kids represent reality. The 99.99% of my time that is not violent is about carrying on, connecting with people and together enjoying and celebrating life. So the most important part of my martial training is the discipline, emotional control, and inner balance that lets me put pain behind me and live a full life. And these skills apply to all kinds of situations– emotional pain, accidents, sickness, death–things that real life is full of far more than real life is full of violent physical confrontation.

Of course, some people face real violence on a day-to-day basis, something I truly know nothing about. But for those who, like me, train ourselves despite having been blessed with a peaceful life, we need to remember where the real treasure of the rich practice of martial arts truly lies.

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Discipline

We had a lecture on discipline this week from Master, which dovetails nicely with my own recent reflections. While I was in Hunan teaching that summer program for kids, the effort of trying to get them to rise to an acceptable discipline level had me thinking about how discipline is taught. I think it is a great mystery to me still, but I am starting to get a few ideas.

There are, of course, two kinds of discipline: external discipline and internal discipline. External discipline is when someone else is yelling at you and punishing you when fail to meet expectations. China in general, and our kungfu school in particular, is a great place for external discipline. When one steps out of line, there are shouts, lectures, and ultimately a cane to put one back on course.

Internal discipline is the real prize, however. It is self-discipline, self-control that lets one do what one needs to do when no one is there to motivate you. This is what a human being needs to live well, and this is what we train kungfu to find. It is the superior kind of discipline; a self-disciplined individual thrives even in an external-discipline environment, but an externally disciplined individual withers without their discipliners.

I have come to believe that we in the West misunderstand the role that external discipline plays in developing internal discipline. It is logical that if one is always externally disciplined, one never develops the responsibility to be self-disciplined. This is certainly true. But I think this leads people to try to teach self-discipline with a kind of sink-or-swim approach. We throw ourselves, our students, and our children into deep water, trusting to instinct or chance to teach them the right self-reliance. If they sink, we drag them out, but just chuck them back in the deep water at the next opportunity. Without incredible luck, failure cycles downward into more failure, and discipline is lost altogether.

I feel that external discipline is like the shallow end of the pool. It’s true you will never truly learn to swim if you never leave the shallows, but there are valuable lessons to be learned there: comfort in the water being foremost, but also coordination. In terms of discipline, comfort in the water is just confidence and an understanding of the benefits of discipline.

Coordination means fidelity between the part of your mind giving commands and the part carrying them out. This is critical. When I first came to Wudang, getting up at 5:00 AM was a huge challenge. I would tell myself to get up, but the part of me receiving the command didn’t believe it would happen, and this lack of faith made self-discipline impossible. I didn’t believe I would do what I told myself to do. So I would be late for training. Punishment pushups and the humiliation of being punished are not fun at 5:15AM, and after a while I learned to get up on time if only to avoid them. But in that process, my lower mind began to believe that it would do what my upper mind told it, and this was an important step for me.

So I have come to believe that teaching self-discipline needs external discipline. Opportunities for self-reliance must be given, but the time in between must be used to practice the coordination that makes success possible.

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Cultural Blind Spots

I had a conversation with some of my classmates the other day about eating meals with our Chinese companions. The fact is, noisy eating doesn’t carry the taboo of bad manners here the way it does back home. Notice your own reaction as I describe this– lip smacking, loud slurping, and that “chuk chuk” sound you get when someone chews with their mouth open. How did you react? Did you crinkle your nose, or have a little involuntary shudder? It’s pretty ingrained in me to have a fairly strong reaction to these behaviors, and I gather that most other westerners feel the same way.

Change gears for a second. I once watched an lecture on TV about wine tasting. The instructor talked about essentially slurping the wine. Our sense of smell is such a large part of our sense of taste, so getting air into the wine and the bouquet into your nose lets you taste the wine more completely.

So what if our Chinese companions are experiencing their food more completely than we are thanks to eating habits that we won’t even consider because we have been taught to find them gross? Please don’t misunderstand, I am not arguing for slurping and open mouth chewing. But I think this example illustrates pretty clearly the idea of a cultural blind spot: an idea and experience that people of a given culture can’t even perceive because a cultural inhibition stops them from even looking in that direction. And I think this example also makes clear how subtle these inhibitions are. Coming to another country, living here, and being forced to deal with this culture as a daily reality instead of a holiday novelty has made me question many such customs that I had taken for granted before. I have been forced to reconsider the difference between being of a specific culture and being human.