September 17, 2012

• Then and Now

  “So, do you feel especially wiser?” asked [Campbell], as we dug into the Black Forest birthday cake that [CM] bought for me.

  “Well, I didn’t really expect to be in Australia at 30,” I said.  Life takes a lot of strange turns that you don’t really expect like that. That’s probably indicative of something, that new things keep on happening.

   

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  I’ve been talking to a few people lately about birthdays and stuff.  [DilligentB] theorises that guys tend to not make a big deal about their birthdays for whatever reasons– she doesn’t think that they necessarily fear or feel opposed to getting older any more than women do, it’s just that women think that birthdays are happy events that should be celebrated while guys just ‘don’t want to make a big deal out of it.’  [CM], I think, is in that camp that thinks that birthdays should be a big thing.

  Over the past few days leading up to my birthday, CM has tried very hard to make it memorable– we’ve gone out eating, I got an awesome present, we’ve spent time just wandering around downtown Sydney together, we even went hunting for the perfect black forest cake.  To CM, she considers it part of her so-called “girlfriend duties” to make sure that I know it’s my birthday.

  I don’t mind all the attention I guess; it’s nice to feel that people care, despite everything.

   

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  When I was young, like up to college, I think birthdays were a ‘bigger’ thing for my close friends and I. They were different times. Age meant something very different.

  In large part, my understanding of the world in my college years was highly characterised by competitive martial arts and badminton.  When I was in high school, I was never really active in any physical activities– truth be told, in early high school and elementary, I was a weakling, more prone to being the bullee than the bully.  I used to have asthma problems, and I rationalized not making the soccer or volleyball team when I tried in my senior years.  I went in the more ‘academic’ route of music instead, putting all my energy into the high school band, which was my life back then.

  In elementary school?  I was the typical homebody, mal-adjusted Asian kid in a predominantly Itallian neighbourhood.  Booksmart, but twig thin.  Because I was not good for soccer (despite that I loved to play), schoolyard cred was pretty low.

   

  It was when I was about 18 that I started doing Jeet Kune Do at the suggestion of my parents.  They were going for a walk in my hometown of LaSalle when they saw a class being held at an aerobics studio.  I don’t know why my mom ever agreed to it– she’s the kind of person who in reality is so opposed to any sort of violence that she must have thought that martial arts was all about movie-type wuxia practice, because she never would have agreed to the kinds of things I would eventually train.  But in any case, it was a major turning point for me in life.  It was there that I met [P-Chan], the instructor, and he gave me a lot of important initial views on life, challenges, and transitions.

   

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  Starting off in Jeet Kune Do opened up several doors to me.  P-Chan introduced me to the writings of Bruce Lee.  Most remember him just as an B-movie kung-fu flic icon, but he was also a philosophy major, and wrote extensively (and more importantly, in English) about the relationship between martial spirit and life.  The drive to improve oneself through martial arts, to seek the right questions, to become one with one’s body to the point where the body knows better than the mind what to do– all these sorts of things were feelings that I’d never experienced before.

  Over the years, I trained in various martial arts.  From JKD, I moved on to kickboxing.  From kickboxing, I moved to a more freestyle form of standup fighting, which would eventually be put to the anvil of the Dawson Martial Arts club where I got my first tastes of opponents from karate, judo, brazillian jujitsu, capoeira, aikdo, etc…. and then I started training more as a mixed martial artist, learning techniques as I went.

   

  There were periods where I would ‘quit’ martial arts due to injuries, and ironically, that’s when I started playing badminton.  I say ironically, because the main reason I started badminton was that I needed a gentle, recreational sport that was easy on my body.  In fact, badminton was almost just as rough on my body as mixed martial arts, although in different ways.  The rotator cuff, wrist, elbow, and knee injuries are testament to that.

   

  The thing was, by the time I started badminton, I had so much fighting spirit in me that I could no longer do anything except at 105%.  More accurately, perhaps it wasn’t fighting spirit– it was more like something manifest of rage.  When I was in college and undergrad, I had so many made up reasons to be angry about life.  Martial arts and badminton gave me a channel to purge and make use of this rage, and I felt rewarded in how the channeling of this boundless energy gave me results that casual practitioners didn’t “naturally” know how to tap.  It meant that it took that much more to beat me down in a round of sparring.  It meant that if I had to pull a superman dive to get that bird that nobody thought I could get, I would be there.  Because, while the world made no sense, sparring and badminton did.

   

  You can definately see how important those events are to me if you took a look at my resume.  I’ve opened up and run several martial arts and badminton groups, and I’ve even spent a fair amount of time coaching people in both.

   

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  As injuries stockedpiled over the years, the reason why birthdays were important during college and undergrad were because another birthday was sort of like: “Wow, can you believe it?  We’re not dead yet.  That’s pretty fucking amazing.”  Every year was an attempt to top the past, and see how far we could push it.

   

  Some of my favourite injuries were [RTB] getting an axe kick in the eye.  [Terminator] once accidentally blocked a side kick with only his thumb.  I had my spine cranked out once due to a rear-naked choke with hooks and I didn’t tap out fast enough– the result was that I couldn’t walk properly for a week.  Ah, the glory days.

  I think I was at my most fit either during the peak of MMA training, or when I was doing black-belt testing for taekwondo while in South Korea.

   

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  However, I think, if I had to think about it, the worst injury, and also the one that changed my view on life, was when I came back to Montreal 2.0.  I had joined a taekwondo dojang, and during warmups, I suffered a pretty severe back injury.

   

  Given that it was during warmups, and not even during actual combat, I think it was a major blow for me psychologically.  It was one of the major hints that “you’re not as young as you used to be.”

   

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  Somewhere, since then, I think birthdays have come to represent simply “getting older.”  True, I do feel a bit wiser maybe from year to year.  I’m really, truly blessed to have constant chances at living different lives all around the world and doing different things.  I really consider it a privilege to be out here in Australia studying law right now, especially given how I’ve lived so many fulfilling lifetimes of different experiences even up to now.

  But those are the mental aspects.

   

  As someone whose motivations and drives in life are deeply rooted in physical development as much as mental and spiritual, getting older means more frequent reiterations that my joints aren’t as good as they were, that I’m not as fast as I used to be.  So what’s there to celebrate?

   

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  Over the past few days leading up to my brithday, CM and I have been talking a lot about my stance on birthdays, and I think I’ve come to actually be a bit more accepting of the idea as a result.  I don’t accept ageing very well, to be honest– I don’t want to get older.  Never did.  I always want to be young.  All the experiences I’ve had only tell me that there’s so much more to the world than I can ever see, and the limited amount of time I have on this planet to see all those things saddens me.

  But what being with CM is gradually getting through my thick skull is that it’s not all about going full tilt at all times– there are finer things that result with experience that I couldn’t possibly have appreciated when I was younger.  Basically, not everything was great when I was younger, so it’d be inaccurate to retrospectively glorify it categorically as ‘better times.’

  On the contrary: if I really look at things, I’m at a great time in my life.  In fact, it is the best time of my life– and that’s how it should be, with only things to look forward to, and only insight and experience to look back on.

   

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  I can’t change the fact that I’m going to continue to get older.  I can’t change the fact that that will have a direct consequence on my ability to engage in physical activities that I care about.

   

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  What I can change is what I appreciate about things.   And it’s a necessity– ageing is almost like the “greiving” process, in that at a certain point, when you start realising that it’s  a “problem,” you need to eventually move on to that stage of “acceptance.”

   

   

  Today, I turn 30.  It’s a huge freaking number, and unfortunately, it’s not the biggest number either– it only gets worse from here on. 

   

  But that’s not all there is to me.  To answer Campbell’s question, do I feel wiser?   Not always– but little by little, I’m learning to accept my limitations.  The hard part, of course, is phrasing such an acceptance as something other than a negative thing.

   

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  I realise I’m a stubborn man though.  I also realise that for all my idealism about physical development, it’s just that: idealism.  Nobody says that that’s the golden rule, and it’s not true that I’m even consistently dedicated to it.

   

  My tactic, this year, will be to simply switch my physical activities to something I’ve never done before.  That way, I can appreciate developing an activity ‘new’ and get that feeling of constantly having my body learn, without knowing so much about the activity to be able to compare my current performance with past performance.  Basically, I’m going to try something new, so that without precedent, I can really feel that I’m learning and going forward.

   

  That means that I’m mostly hanging up my gloves for competitive MMA or stand-up fighting.  This thursday, I begin Judo.

   

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  This is not a mid crisis decision– I’ve been talking to [Zanshin] and [Terminator] about wanting to take up Judo for years.  It’s a very different game from the brazillian jujitsu that I’m used to, and I have no doubt that I’m going to get my ass totally kicked when I go out there.  But it’ll be fun, I’m sure.

  I think that as I learn this new thing, it’ll be an opportunity to really rediscover myself and figure out my philosophy of life for the next decade.

  • 9:06 am
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