Put Up a Parking Lot
Ha ha. Look at them lemons in their pyjamas. Imagine doing that in your spare time. Imagine thinking that waving your legs about would work in a real fight. You’d have to be daft. What sort of chump would do that for fun, eh?
Well, this sort of chump. Me.
I’ve been practicing karate for the better part of two decades now. Almost everyone I know in real life knows about it, but it’s something I think I’ve only ever mentioned once on social media, where I’m mostly anonymous. There are strangers there, and to be honest, it’s all a bit embarrassing.
See, I know what an interest in martial arts looks like to most people. It’s sort of adolescent, isn’t it? A bit ‘weirdo with a plastic bag in the park’. Remember Ross in Friends and his oonagi? Remember that one episode where Monica’s boyfriend tried cage fighting and looked like a dick? Ha ha. Imagine trying that. Dicks.
The subject crops up in other peoples’ conversations and you overhear, too. I mean, it’s not as if you go down the shops in your gi.
Well, not often.
Karate is what’s known as a traditional martial art. The traditional martial arts are usually seen as being distinct from the new fangled combat arts like Krav Maga, or mixed martial arts (MMA), which is what they do in cage fights and the UFC. For a long time, to people into those things, traditional martial arts were seen as being kind of useless. Traditional martial artists entered the early UFC events and got beaten up, so what use are they in a fight, ammirite?
That’s kind of shifted a bit in the last few years, as some fighters with their base in karate have managed to make it work in the cage and succeed, like Lyoto Machida, who beat the legendary Randy Couture with what people kept calling the crane technique from The Karate Kid. More recently you’ve had Stephen ‘Wonderboy’ Thompson doing well. So that’s nice at least.
But it’s only shifted a bit. If you want to learn to fight, the general consensus seems to be that you should learn MMA. If you want to practice self defence, you should do Krav Maga or something. Why bother with things that waste your time like kata, wide stances or point-fighting?
In 2017, karate, to MMA fans and the general public alike, can often just be where you drop the kids off a couple of times a week.
All of which can leave you in an odd position if you’re a grownup and a karate practitioner. If you’re not careful, it can leave you having something you’re proudest of achieving also being something you keep from strangers and undercut with jokes and apologies if you ever write about it.
For my part, I’ve always had a difficult relationship with the more esoteric aspects of what I do. I tend to reject the kung fu movie aphorisms and all those things you hear about the perfection of character or whatever. That stuff is there if you wan’t it to be, but I’d rather leave it to one side. It’s enough that it’s fun, helps keep me fit, and leaves me better able to kick people in the dingding.
Or at least, it has been. A couple of things happened recently that made me open the box in my brain with ‘potentially embarrassing stuff’ written on the side.
I haven’t always had an easy time with training. I’ve had a bunch of difficult things going on in my life that have made it less than straightforward to be able to commit to getting out in the evenings, so I’ve missed a fair bit of training. The older you get, the quicker you lose your fitness, strength and flexibility when you can’t train regularly, and boy was that happening. I was wondering whether I could continue at all.
Then, earlier this year I had a revelation. MMA gyms are full time and aren’t restricted to just a couple of lessons a week. I could train in the mornings, and it wouldn’t matter as much if I had to skip karate in the evening sometimes. So I joined one and started Muay Thai. The techniques are similar enough to keep things from getting confusing, and Muay Thai tends to focus on one of the aspects of training I most enjoy — pad work. It’s a win-win!
And then the first thing happened.
I’d been doing Muay Thai once or twice a week for a little while when my karate instructor sent me a meme. My instructor’s a bit like me in that he doesn’t take things too seriously. If he sends a meme, it’s normally a bum joke, but this wasn’t a bum joke. It was non-ironic and serious and it completely short-circuited my inbuilt sarcasm chip. Here it is:
That was exactly what I needed to hear right then, because it reminded me of something important. I never gave up. Even when life meant it would have been much easier for me to. Even after I walked out of black belt gradings a failure, still wearing my old brown one.
I never bloody gave up.
It’s a valuable thing, to be properly reminded of something you achieved when you’re used to looking at what you missed. To be reminded of what you are doing rather than what you’re not. I honestly think that standing there, looking at the meme on my phone was the first time I stopped to think properly about what having a black belt meant. You know, beyond the dingding stuff.
Don’t tell anyone, but I think it means that some of the zen elements I’ve been so keen to distance myself from are…right.
Because there’s another reason the meme works, beyond the obvious backslapping surface of it. There’s a concept in some of the traditional martial arts that says that nobody is an expert, everyone is constantly learning. There is no real destination — only a constant journey.
In that sense, it doesn’t matter what level you are, or how good you might look to other people, you’re still a white belt. It’s okay to feel like you’re not where you’d like to be, because you never are.
I might have just kept that to myself and moved on, but then the second thing happened.
One night, as we gathered up our bags after karate, my instructor did something else I din’t expect. He called us all over and revealed he’d been keeping the club afloat for quite a while with his own money. And we’d lost one too many students to keep it going.
In a few months, the club that had been open for a good decade before I rocked up there 17 years ago would have to close.
At first, although I was incredibly upset, I wasn’t too worried about my own training. I could just bump up the number of times I do Muay Thai per week. I could even give Brazilian Jiu Jitsu a go, which is something I’ve always meant to try. There’d be no more being told my punch needed to be a centimetre to the left or anything either, which is one of the more frustrating things about karate.
But as time went on, the more I thought about what I’d be missing, and the more value I saw in those things in the ‘potentially embarrassing’ box.
When I’m in the dojo, when I’m mid-kata and in that state where I’m concentrating on nothing other than making this next side kick the best side kick I’ve ever thrown, everything else melts away. Nothing exists except that technique. At risk of sounding like Higgins out of Magnum P.I., this is mushin, or the state of no mind. It’s rare to feel as at peace as in that moment, especially when you have a, shall we say, idiosyncratic system of attention. I feel that much more during kata practice than sparring.
Muay Thai doesn’t include kata. Nor does it include kihon, or basic technique practice, really. This is one of the reasons it’s often seen as being separate from traditional martial arts, although it’s been around for hundreds of years in one form or another.
I never really thought these things were important in and of themselves, beyond being parts of a whole, but the more I think about them now, the more I think they are.
And now I will only practice them on my own.
Last Wednesday, I bowed and left the dojo for the last time. The doors closed, and the people I’d trained with for so long all went their separate ways.
Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.
In the future, I’ll continue with Muay Thai, which I do actually love, and I may well give Brazilian Jiu Jitsu a try if my body holds out and keeps injury-free. But I’ll miss all the things I kept boxed up before. I’ll also miss kata. I’ll miss kihon. I’ll even miss being told to move my fist a centimetre to the left.
If I ever find a karate club I can commit to attending, I’ll probably go along, but I haven’t found one yet.
So, here’s probably my favourite karate video ever. This is the Japan women’s kata team performing in the 2012 world championships. In the first three minutes, the team perform their kata. After that, they display a highly stylised version of what those movements may have meant.
This is what I’ll be missing. Enjoy.
