WINNING THE KARATE BATTLE…
BUT LOSING THE WAR
(August ‘96/#12)
Ever get that urge to use your Martial Art and have a real Karate Battle? Ever get the urge to see just how many facial bones you can break with one quick punch to the face of the one who irks you the most? Ever get the urge to smack that idiot in the grin with an elbow, step on the knee joint sideways, knee the chin, grab the hair and pummel the face and….
Don’t do it. Try talking. Honestly communicate your anger, learn to get along. In this Case History I’m going to tell you why.
Ever hear that old saw about ‘What goes around comes around?’
Ever hear that biblical saying, ‘Do unto others…’ There’s a reason for that sort of saying.
I had a friend who I’ll call Lamont.
Lamont was one of my favorite work out partners. Lamont was a 1st brown belt when I was a 2nd brown belt, and he was one of these darned karate animals that you hear about. He liked the hard work out. He liked the pain. He liked to punch the bag or the makiwara for an hour at a time. He liked the sweat of pure learning which is so essential to the martial arts.
Lamont and I liked to work out together. We always paired up when it came time to work our techniques. We knew we could go hard and fast, that we could take what each other had to offer, that we could explore the art in hard core fashion.
One day Lamont was no longer there. I missed him of course, but the art went on and I kept working and working and…one day…I was a black belt. Shortly after that Lamont dropped by the school.
‘Where you been?’ I asked as I wrung out his hand.
‘I been teaching the art of XXXXX,’ was the answer.
I blinked. Lamont teaching another art, one which I knew, and which we had agreed before he left the school, was inferior. And then I remembered.
Shortly before Lamont left he had told me a story. He told me that he had been talking with a XXXXX practitioner. They had decided to do a little freestyle. During the freestyle time had suddenly slowed down for him and the art began to manifest. He saw the kick the XXXXX practitioner was thinking about, and when it came he angled the bones of his solid and sturdy frame into correct alignment, swung his arm, dropped his weight, focused, and executed an absolutely perfect low block. Classical power is not to be denied, and the bones of the XXXXX practitioners leg were broken in two places. It didn’t break like a twig, it was like a whole section of bone was separated from the rest of the bones.
Lamont felt bad, to say the least. And while he laughed about it when he relayed the story to me it was a nervous laugh that said, ‘I did something wrong, something has to be done about what I did!’
His solution, his amends to the XXXXX practitioner for the damage he had done, was to switch arts. He gave up something that was pure and perfect for something that was not, and when I asked him about it he talked around it and never realized what he was doing.
Want to hit somebody? Want to see if you can punch a kidney so hard the toxins can’t pass through and the fellow dies a slow and painful death?
Don’t do it. You may win the Karate Battle, but you’ll lose the war. The results may be more terrible than you can understand.
