Martial Arts

Work Tired

by TomLaPille on May 15, 2011

I am very tired.

Today, I went to an SCA fight practice. I was fighting on and off for about two and a half hours in thirty pounds of armor. We were practicing one on one fights, in which my weapon of choice is a greatsword. Everyone I was practicing with was fighting sword and shield. In the greatsword versus sword-and-shield matchup, their goal is to use their shield to close as fast as possible to negate my range advantage, and they were correctly charging me at the beginning of each fight. To win, I needed to use my greater mobility to attack them from the side, or just keep them at range and whack away until I scored something. Despite the extra armor weight, I had to move quickly if I wanted a chance at success. The day took a lot out of me, but I had a mental breakthrough that I suspect will be important later, so I’m happy I went.

I just got home from having dinner at some friends’ apartment, where I nearly fell asleep on their couch before realizing that I should probably just go home.

There is a large part of me that doesn’t want to write this post.

Yet, here I am. Why?

First, I committed to posting six days a week. I want to prove to myself that I can do that. I spent my one cheat day a week this past Thursday, so fulfilling my commitment to myself means posting something tonight.

Second, I want to build discipline. I need to write regularly to practice, so I want to train my brain that daily writing is not an optional activity.

Those two factors sound nice, but they weren’t enough to get me to post. The deciding factor was the idea that I could make today an experiment. How little effort could I put into a post before it was publishable?

Why would I do this? Let’s take a detour into the land of martial arts. One of the textbooks that we study at the kenjutsu dojo I am attending discusses the three stages of learning any technique, from the most basic vertical cut to sophisticated entering techniques that require split-second timing. I’ll use the basic vertical cut as my example.

The first stage is learning how to do the technique at all. The motions must be programmed into your body. Move the sword from center gaurd to above your head with a snap, then move your hands forward before snapping the sword on the way back down. Stop the power as soon as the snap is finished so that you don’t overextend your wrists. If we can do all this without prompting, no matter how slow or unrealistic it looks, we’ve satisfied this criteria.

I know how to write, and I’ve created several five hundred to one thousand word blog entries in the past few weeks.

The second stage is learning how to do it without thinking about it. To execute a vertical cut in combat, you need to be familiar enough with the technique that your brain can reproduce it while it is focusing on other things. Deciding whether or not a vertical cut is a good idea right now takes up a lot of energy, and can take up all the mental space you once used to remember how to do it at all. In martial arts, we develop this ability with tons and tons of repetition. I find that I get to this level with a technique at around the thousandth repetition.

I haven’t written a thousand blog posts, but I’m getting better at identifying whether an idea will work well in a blog post and what the structure should be before I start writing. I still have more work to do, but I can feel this coming.

The third stage, and the most challenging part, is to learn how to do it while expending the minimum required energy. Once you transcend your brain as a limitation on doing the technique, we move on to your body. Physical energy is a resource, and hurting someone with an attack requires power. Our goal is to spend as little energy as possible on each attack so that we don’t run out of energy before we run out of things that need to be attacked. To develop this skill in martial arts, we execute the technique over and over again until we are exhausted, then keep going. When we’re tired, we force our bodies to do things in the most efficient way possible, because there simply isn’t energy to do it any other way. Once we find this way, we can use it when we are fresh, and we’ll get tired more slowly.

I currently have trouble writing for more than three or four hours before getting fatigued, and quality starts to suffer after an hour or two. I want to develop the ability to keep going longer than that. This is a chance to practice writing tired, and when I cast it that way, it was obvious that I needed to write.

I may be exhausted, but to my eye, I was able to write something that is readable and delivers value.

I’m calling that a win. Then, I’m going to sleep.

The Decision-Action Gap

by TomLaPille on May 4, 2011

I’ve met people who take a long time between deciding to do something and actually acting on the decision. Sometimes, I am one of those people. The good news is that there are a bunch of us. The bad news is that the samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo would tell us that we’re all a bunch of idiots, and he’s probably more right than wrong.

Yamamoto lived from 1659 to 1719, during the twilight of the samurai as a warrior class. Wars were no longer commonplace, so the role of the aristocracy was changing from military to administrative. Yamamoto’s commentary on the proper role of a samurai has been handed down to us as Hagakure, which is now famous for being the work that codified bushido, or the way of the warrior.

By my reading, Hagakure is actually a work born of imagined nostalgia for a way of life that never was. Yamamoto wasn’t alive during Japan’s constant civil wars in the 1500′s. He never interacted with feudal Japanese warlords while they were at the height of their power, which coincidentally was also when they were at the height of their ruthless practicality. Bushido, like chivalry, is an imagined construct that medieval people would have thought was quite silly.

Regardless, Hagakure still has plenty of lessons to teach us. Plenty of the statements it contains make tons of sense once translated. One of my favorites goes something like “It is foolishness to walk about with one’s hands inside the slits of one’s hakama,” which translates fairly cleanly to “Keep your hands out of your pockets.” This is just good advice. There’s also plenty of inapplicable advice, like a description of the circumstances that make killing yourself appropriate. What I’m interested in today, though, is that Yamamoto spends a lot of time talking about how a proper samurai’s thought and action should occur simultaneously. Any gap between decision and action, he says, is a sign of weakness and will get you killed.

It’s not a great surprise that a manual written by a warrior would emphasize this. I’ve been studying classical kenjutsu for going on two years, and the punishing effect of time spent between decision and action is quite obvious in combat. When you and an opponent are moving at full speed, you only have a split second after deciding on a course of action before that action is no longer useful. Spending even a half a second without moving while you’re in striking distance of your opponent’s sword will get you killed. Hundreds of years later, we still use the same technology for reducing the lag between decision and physical action: huge numbers of repetitions of the correct motions. After enough practice, it begins to feel like the decision is being made in one’s arms instead of one’s head.

Fortunately or unfortunately, we can no longer rely upon the constant threat of lethal combat to train us to act immediately on thoughts. When I decide to go to a concert, then actually buy the ticket a week later, no one punches me in the face in the meantime. Usually, there are still tickets. Very occasionally, we get punished for this kind of delay; maybe the seats we wanted are gone, or something else. Most of the time, though, nothing happens to us as a result.

The cost of waiting in cases like this is more subtle. Rather than let your brain move on to other things, and come up with new ideas to act on, you force your brain to hold onto the decision you made until you move it into reality. There’s only so much your brain can handle at once, so building up these un-actioned ideas starts to block your mind from processing fresh things and producing new ideas.

This all assumes you do actually get all the way to acting eventually. That’s hardly a given. In this cushy modern world, free of immediate consequences that cause bodily harm, we can get away with never actually taking action at all, instead basking in the good feeling that comes from a decision made and shirking the fear of whatever consequences might come from action. Assuming you actually want to act on a decision, acting never is far worse than acting after a delay.

Acting immediately after making a decision can be scary if you’re used to having time in between. The good news is that the information you get from the results of acting quickly dissipates whatever fear of the unknown you have before you act. Once you step through the door, you can look around, and make a new decision based on what you see.

I understood that I needed to start this blog for several months before I actually launched it. During that time, I learned almost nothing about blogging, WordPress, or how I was going to handle a daily writing commitment. I have learned more each day since launch than I did in months of waiting.

Any time between a decision and the associated action is wasted time. Train to remove it, and you will die less often in swordfights and achieve things faster.

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