They say discretion is the better part of valour, that you should pick your battles. But when you’re under constant bombardment, it’s not exactly easy to remember that you have that option. You don’t have time – or don’t feel as if you have the time – to stop and think and strategise, and the problem compounds until you’re living in a purely reactive way, and your brain is so busy reacting, it doesn’t have the free capacity to strategise and get you the two steps ahead that you need to be in order to have the time to stop and think and plan… It’s a nasty, vicious spiral leading to implosion under pressure.
This is one of the hardest things about sparring when you start learning martial arts: it all happens os fast, you don’t have time to think. You have to learn to think faster, or at least faster than your opponent, while at the same time, not thinking at all, and allowing your body to react and adapt until you see the opening and timing to score a hit. It’s not easy, and it’s disheartening, especially when sparring against those who are better than you, because they seem to do it so easily, so calmly, so effortlessly – while you get flustered and never land a hit.
When life gets hectic, it’s too easy to fall into this pattern of reacting, of trying to change up your mental gears in a frantic effort to keep up. The trick, it seems, is the same as in sparring – stop thinking, stop trying to keep up and just let it flow – adapt, don’t fight it, go with it. And that should give you the mental space to see the opening, the opportunity, the way through. Easier said than done, but also easier than drowning.
No comments:
Post a Comment