Where had I gone in my martial arts past? Yeah, I was studying, had my nose in books, was a heavy drinker, smoked like a heretic and was working nightshifts. Certainly not the reflection of the life of a samurai or any other warrior for that matter. In 1999 that didn't go quite well and I suffered from Buerger's Disease.Dis-ease is an apt description for the state I was in as I could hardly walk 300 meters before my legs would get locked and I couldn't take a next step.
When I went to the GP with my complaints, he promptly called his colleague to feel how appallingly little blood was flowing through my legs to the feet and I was immediately referred to the cardiologist and the vascular surgeon.
Next came a period of hospital visits, sick leave, resumption of work, company doctors and the like. During an angiography through the inguinal artery, the operating doctors had to make a phone call with the head surgeon and then placed a stent which initially was not on the agenda. I quit smoking after the vascular surgeon told me: Listen, I'm not going to tell you to stop smoking because that's entirely up to you, but I do have to tell you that if you continue to smoke, we will have to amputate at least one foot or part of your leg within a period of three years. I lit my last cigarette after eleven o'clock on New Year's Eve 1999 and never lit up another through this century.
It was a somewhat messy time of uncertainty in which, in addition to hassle about work, income and regulations plus legal quirks over those, my feeling of and towards my body and how I felt about myself were occasionally turned upside down. In short, I had to crawl out of that rag basket that I had just ended up in before I was 50 years old.
Nightshifts were now taboo for me and in 2000 I started working daytimes in the day care center of the institution I was working. I also had to reinvent myself a bit in the physical sense and possibilities. Walking distances remained a difficult undertaking and my condition was quite below par. I did look for suitable forms of movement and exercise while developing an interest in things like Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais and the like. It would take another 10 years before my involvement in the martial arts would actually get a renewed impulse.
My new job in the daycare center meant that I had to deal with at times quite violent physical aggression again on a regular basis. Once, I received (completely unjustified) a reprimand from my employer about the course of such a situation.
In the meantime, my employer was more deliberate and sensible about actual aggressive behavior within an institutional setting than in the 1980s. And they had set up special training courses on "dealing with aggression"; something that a number of colleagues, including myself, have had to argue for for years.
Although what I had learned in aikido training about twenty years before I was able to use in my work in a good and measured way, I was of course anything but a martial artist, an accomplished fighter or an expert in curbing aggression. However, I did have the feeling that within my actual work situation, I was able to deal relatively well with the forms of aggression that occurred there and was less anxious about it than some colleagues. Which in turn meant that I was asked to show up more often in such situations. When I started in this job, I was more or less surprised by the frequency and the level of aggression I encountered. And I had the opportunity to experience the impact first-hand. I now felt I had much more insight into how to deal with and see it coming, and it seemed to me that many people in public positions had a much harder time in that respect than I did.
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