A martial arts career?(7)

 This particular blog in this series is no longer about my involvement with but actually about what is meant by martial arts in general. 

In the martial arts, a distinction is sometimes made between internal and external systems or styles also referred to as soft and hard styles. A distinction that is of particular importance to me personally.

But what distinguishes a martial art from any other sport or pursuit?  At first glance, it seems pretty clear what a martial art or a martial art would be about, namely the mutual measurement of each other's strength and the ability to win a fight. In the first instance, strength and muscular and well-trained bodies will come to mind and then perhaps things such as flexibility, agility and timing. But psychological factors and/or character traits can also carry considerable weight and may determine the outcome of a fight.

Struggle and winning a fight are likely to take central stage. Duels are probably of all times or certainly go very far back in time. How we look at it and what meanings we attribute to it may differ quite a bit per culture and era. In our culture, we don't think it's kosher anymore to kill each other (although?; see the struggles and wars raging all around us) and it's forbidden by law.

Since blood is thicker than water and the people have a need for games in addition to bread, almost every culture has forms of regulated and/or ritualized or played fights. In our culture, for example, these are wrestling or boxing matches and more recently Eastern martial arts such as those from Japan and China. And after all, every sporting match is an expression of the need to measure strength and skill among one another in some sort of battle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

Now, of course, the whole of life is not always just sports and games and for some such as soldiers, police officers and other law enforcement officers as well as for some criminals, mastering certain fighting techniques, and thus being able to stand your ground, may therefore considered a professional skill.  

And what do we mean by struggle or a fight? Do you need at least two to tango for that or can you also just struggle with yourself or life in general? Does it have to express itself physically or do we also count a battle of words or ideas as a fight? (think of the well-known saying that war is nothing more than a continuation of politics but by different means) Now, by definition, any form of competition is also a match and thus some sort of battle or fight. In that context, I would like to  to quote Arnon Grunberg from De Groene Amsterdammer nr 35 from 2018. He concludes the essay 'Life as a struggle' in response to the Dutch translation of Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' with: There is much to be said for the fact that life is indeed a struggle. It is nonsensical to claim that this is not the case because people can also work well together; Competition requires cooperation. The crucial question is how we shape this struggle, what rules of the game we apply, so that decent family men and kind mothers, with all their prejudices, whether repulsive or not, do not have to become murderers, executioners and accomplices of murderers. 

In the case of martial arts, we will usually assume a physical component involved that will actually determine the course and outcome of a fight.

Martial arts and/or martial arts can be practiced in all kinds of forms, at various levels and for many reasons. Self-defense, to stay fit and healthy, recreation or character building to name just a few of those reasons.

According to the NOC*NSF, the number of practitioners in the Netherlands would be around 250,000 in 2019 and worldwide, according to Wikipedia, there are hundreds of millions practioners. So if you should feel challenged to play your part; You won’t certainly be the only one and there is a lot to choose from.

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My martial arts career(?) 6

Then in the summary of episode 4 I forgot to mention that Marian and I had participated in the 21st international push-hands meeting of Nils Klug's school in May 2022 and enjoyed taking Birgit Golze's beginner lessons there.         

To complete the CV of my involvement with martial arts: I have been following David Valadez of Senshin Center online for some time now because, to my taste, he has a very interesting view on aikido and martial arts and can also explain and show a lot of these things. He can be found on Patreon, YouTube and Facebook.  

I could of course have named these blogs: My martial arts journey but I figured that would make me look too much like a copycat and besides it wouldn't really capture my actual quest. 

In the previous blog I already touched on the distinction between the (more) internal and the (more) external arts, also referred to as soft and hard styles within the martial arts. I suppose you may have guessed by now that it is precisely the internal side of the coin that fascinated me. Otherwise, my involvement in something like martial arts and the time and effort that I, as one not being interested in fighting to begin with, have invested in it would be somewhat difficult to understand. My first acquaintance more than forty years ago was, not entirely coincidentally, with an art that happened to be also called The Art of Peace or the art of non-fighting. https://dimasplace.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/tussen-5-morihei-ueshiba/

 On the aikido mat you may find a group of participants usually more mixed in terms of age, big or small and male/female ratio than in most martial arts . Aikido is also commonly considered to be one of the gentlest forms of martial art. "Harmony" is a key concept in aikido and a term you can hear quite often in a class or training. What initially amazed me quite a bit was that those aikido practitioners all talked about harmony and so forth and in the still unite in so many different organizations that all pretend they represent the true ideal of "the great teacher". It reminded me strongly of the splits and mutual condemnation as was once common among protestant groups in the Calvinist Netherlands.

So you may come accross many practitioners on the aikido mat whose prime motivation to practice this art was of an idealistic nature. And then the monster of dogmatics is easily lingering just around the corner. The objections of Rokas (see previous blog) are not entirely out of the blue; For which is stronger: life or doctrine? There are also quite a few people (especially among enthusiastic practitioners of aikido or tai chi) who will never miss an opportunity to preach peace and quiet while they seem to constantly want to fight everything and everyone and moreover themselves. 

In any case, I had a great time rolling around on the mat every week during those first three years while they tried to teach me some tricks of a martial nature. Also what is called the philosophy of aikido intrigued me enough to always have kept me busy in one  way or another. Which resulted in a renewed acquaintance with aikido some five years before my retirement until now. However, my view of the matter has now broadened somewhat. I have some more knowledge and background information about Eastern wisdom traditions such as Buddhism and Taoism, my interest now also includes martial arts of Chinese origin. Possibly even more than those that are supposed to be Japanese. I'm even taking kung fu classes these days. Kung fu or gongfu means something like difficult or artful work that you just do not easily master and requires quite a bit of training and effort. So not necessarily a martial art, although it has become known in that sense in the West. That's partly because of a certain Bruce Lee, the man of: be like water, my friend. 

I assume that it is now clear that I am not involved in these things to learn or to be able to fight better, but rather to leave all that fighting behind me whenever possible. So to shed a light on that question mark in the title of these blogs, I'm going to remove both the question mark and the title completely and I won't talk about myself anymore as a martial artist or as a warrior of some sort nor use any related terms because that's not me at all. But still in due time, I would like to talk some more about that so called internal power, which I referred to in the previous blog, and how it  links to the various martial arts because that is something that happens to fascinate me immensely. 

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