Your life is a moving meditation
What martial arts teaches you about the mundane aspects of daily living
“You’re a brave boy,” said the 70-something doctor as he shakily pulled the blood-filled syringe out of my left ear.
I didn’t feel brave, just peeved. The needle prick and blood being drawn didn’t hurt nearly as much as the bumps, scrapes, and soreness I’ve picked up from training. The discomfort of not being able to train was much worse.
Sadly, it’s unavoidable: Anyone who practices a full-contact martial art (or rugby) will eventually encounter the looming threat of cauliflower ear. And after years of training, it was my turn. The swelling wasn’t terrible, but my wife could see the slight asymmetry a couple of weeks after I initially asked her about getting it drained.
“I never wanted to marry a man with a disfigured face,” she said. “And the fact that it’s been two weeks and you still haven’t made an appointment just makes this worse.
So I had to take the better part of a week off. Fortunately, I happen to be at the point in my meditations where the meditator is reminded to look outside the time on the mat or cushion and practice as one goes about the day.
And no matter what art you practice, the key to getting good is repetition. So I’ve been thinking about how we drill our movements in Jiu-Jitsu, and the limited experience I’ve had with Shaolin Kung Fu, Kendo, and other traditional arts.
There’s a fluidity that happens, almost by accident, as one moves through the forms again and again. When done intentionally, we begin the process of streamlining. At first, it eases recall, but later, as it becomes muscle memory, the movement becomes effortless.
We practice our art and play our games because they are enjoyable. They are enjoyable because we are able to get better at them by making small refinements to our actions and approaches over time. And over time, I’ve started to see that the pursuit of getting a little bit better at everything I do can be enjoyable in and of itself.
And so my time spent away from the mats was used to fine-tune my morning routine of rousing and making breakfast for my son. I applied the same efficiency of movement I sought in my Jiu-Jitsu to emptying the dishwasher. And when the pharmacist refused to sell me syringes because I told him I might need them to drain my ear —despite him having no problem selling to the junkies and drug addicts who OD with them in my neighborhood—I took it as an opportunity to control my breathing and try a different approach: I went to a different branch of the same chain a few blocks over and didn’t tell them what I needed the needles for.
Alan Watts once said that life is a dance. I’ve never been much of a dancer, but I can just as easily see it as a match. We can stumble through and get caught at every bit of resistance we encounter, or we can treat the whole endeavor as a way to practice effortlessness.
Lao Tzu says that those who know the way wear no armor and yet cannot be pierced by weapons of war or the horns of wild animals. I don’t know if it’s literally true, but I can feel what he means.
That timeless approach can also be applied to our modern era. A time in which we have far less to fear from swords or saber tooths than we do from the crushing mundanity of repetitive menial labor. But our ability to move mindfully through each motion, striving to perfect every movement as if our lives might one day depend on it, is what will relieve modernity’s dull, unrelenting pressure. As David Foster Wallace once said, “It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”
I still wish I was doing Jiu-Jitsu though.