Have you ever thought about all the times we could have died, yet we’re still here?
It is certainly a thought that crosses our minds more than once in a lifetime.
Perhaps when looking back at certain reckless choices made in the unconsciousness of adolescence. Or at accidents narrowly avoided. Or at unexpected events that caught us by surprise, revealing our vulnerabilities.
And yet, we are still here.
From time to time, especially during Self-Defense classes, we use marker-based training exercises. Participants wear a T-shirt they are willing to sacrifice and use washable markers instead of the less practical knives, which have the unfortunate habit of actually cutting.
This teaching method is fairly common in Martial Arts training. The rules are simple: the person holding the marker must strike their training partner’s torso. The exercise is practiced both as marker versus empty hands and marker versus marker.
“The pen is mightier than the sword”, wrote Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839. He certainly could not have imagined that markers are no joke either.
Interesting phenomena emerge during this type of training. First of all, all the rules quickly fall apart. Techniques, usually fluid and orderly, soon give way to chaos. Breathing becomes short and shallow, the ability to focus diminishes, and motor coordination becomes limited.
All of this has been extensively studied and is related to the oldest part of our nervous system. Faced with the primal instinct for surviva -and domination- our system switches into a conservative operating mode. It prepares for flight or fight, maximizing certain functions while shutting down or greatly reducing others.
The markers leave their traces on the T-shirts and on every exposed area of the arms and hands. Every dot and every line would have had a very different color if blades had been used instead of markers.
This is not merely a lesson in humility, forcing us to reconsider our attitude toward training and our actual ability to deal with a potential assault.
Above all, it brings the awareness that, even with optimal training, confronting an armed person is one of the most unnecessarily dangerous things one can do because, if you make it home, you will almost certainly return with some bleeding memories.
But there is an even deeper reflection that we like to bring to the level of the perspectives with which each of us steps onto the tatami.
Most of those reading these pages practice Aikido. Yet we believe the same is true of any Martial Art or combat sport. There have been phases in our lives when our practice was physical, explosive, and entirely competitive. Others in which intensity was measured by the number of hours spent training and by endurance. Others still in which we devoted ourselves to a more active or more receptive approach. And there were times when, within the forms themselves, we seemed to glimpse other dimensions that require neither competition, nor intensity, nor quantity -but which perhaps reveal themselves only after passing through those stages.
We have come home with bruises, dislocations, sprains, hematomas, joints and tendons in need of repair… Yet never, ever have we found ourselves facing someone on the tatami who genuinely wanted to stab us. Certainly, we have encountered people whose sole intention seemed to be hurting others, but unfortunately one discovers from childhood that troubled individuals do exist.
We believe it is clear where this reflection is leading. If it is true -as it undoubtedly is- that no matter how intense and serious martial practice may be, none of us has ever experienced it in such an extreme context that every time we stepped onto the tatami we thought it might be the last thing we ever did.
And so, in our training, we repeatedly experience countless situations in which, had the conditions been those of a real fight, we would have been condemned to months of traction in a hospital bed. Or we might never have made it there at all.
Thinking about all the times we could have died can only do us good. It helps us appreciate the here and now more deeply. It reminds us to be grateful for still living in conditions free from armed conflict. It enhances the quality of our presence.
For countless reasons that each person can list for themselves. But above all, it reminds us that Budo does not teach us to become perfect weapons. Rather, it teaches us to become perfect servants -aware of our own vulnerability and therefore capable of expressing mature freedom and building peace upon the solid foundations of reality.
Disclaimer: the picture portrays some of our students’ scars…