Martial Arts: A Domain of Urgency and Focus

Historically, martial arts used to be a domain of urgency and focus, because the impulse to save your life or the life of your close family and friends was not just an everyday possibility, but a likely occurrence.

There was a fellow who was talking about his 10 years time in maximum security prison in the state of Illinois. He said, he was in a constant state of hyper-awareness in that environment due to the-ongoing presence of internal dangers. And that’s what we mean when we talk about this sense of urgency and focus. This, of course is half of the game, the other half is to stick with the empirical principles and their known consequences if you were to ignore them even for a split second.

A good number of people these days roll in jiu-jitsu, or knife spar, or do stick fighting, but man, they seem quite apathetic or clueless towards urgency and focus and put themselves in bad positions, not realizing what could have actually happened to them. During the 90’s there was a price to pay for being casual or making assertions without proof. Nowadays, we see a lot of people (not all) on the ground leaving things open, not even closely coherent or aware of how bad their elbows could be broken or their lives squeezed away——and just because you know you can tap and your partner would let you go, doesn’t mean you should forget that sense of urgency and focus. With the knife it’s the same attitude. During the knife sparring, we see sometimes the students almost stand or end up in the boxing range and then swing at each other as if it’s a casual fist-fight. Logic, reason, and the thought of a painful, graphic experience of just one quick stab to the chest, leaving you with only few seconds before you drop on the pavement and die, does not seem to occur as often and as consistent as it should. Instead of decreasing the margin of error by thinking more urgently towards the possibility of a dark reality out there, we are becoming too content and distracted with the entertaining Bjj, FMA, and MMA reels and moves.

Sports are great and quite necessary even for the elevation of the rank and state of the nations, but we should still remain awake, and train with a sense of focus and urgency as if our lives depend on it. If we lose that, then everything becomes just a pastime, a sort of distraction, and a mere leisure activity.