As to how my involvement with martial arts came about I told you how it began in the last post and the counter then stands at one season of judo as a 10-year-old and almost three years of aikido training on Monday nights in my early thirties. While I had no desire for nor any interest in fighting whatsoever. I had never, not even as a child, really come across any serious physical encounter or fight. Of course, as a primary school boy, I too did play rough and tumble with my friends, such as on the judo mat, but that was more like probing and playing than a direct expression of sheer aggression.
That does not mean that I would never have had to deal with expressions of aggression or violence or that I had never witnessed any. That seems to me to be the fate of every human being, although the degree to which such is the case may and shall vary tremendously. As far as I can remember, I usually thought the reasons for it odd and incomprehensible. It did evoked fear and/or fascination as an emotion.
By the time I started my aikido training, I also met with aggressive encounters in my job that I couldn't just step away from and that I just had to deal with. I did write about that work of mine earlier under the heading: not your regular job. I didn't write very much about aggression on the job as it is and remains a hard one to crack and say something sensible about. Anyways, aggressive behaviour affects all of us in many ways. Victims will most of the time be keenly aware of this and will often testify to it, sounds that you probably hear considerably less from the side of the perpetrators.
In short, libraries full could be written about the subject of aggression and violence while in many a professional setting and training hardly any or way too little attention is paid the subject. Talking about aggression, violence, self-defense, martial arts, peacefulness and such, these two martial artists have some very sensible things to say on these matters. (listening version)
Since I began working night-shifts in the mid-80s, I seldom encountered unadultered aggression in my work. By that time, most of my attention was absorbed by a study of pedagogy. I took one more trial lesson of aikido in Hoorn, but that teacher was too focused on physical strength and condition to my taste. I also visited some tai chi classes in the village where I live while what I learned about martial arts mainly came from books or an incidental article from a magazine.
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