Fudoshin

His look was half confusion and that other one, as if I were holding a small piece of shit just under his nose and asking him to smell it. “Treat him as if he’s a third grader,” I said again. And again, I get the “look.”

“If a third grader came running in here and up to you, stamped his foot three times like they used to do in Hong Kong to signal a challenge … how would that make you feel?” He thought about it and I could see the change in him. “Good, keep that as he punches you,” referring to his partner.

His partner punched at him – a solid honest punch, if he didn’t get out of the way, he was going to get cracked. The two met – intersected in a single moment - and his partner wound up on the floor. It was well done. “How did that make you feel?” I asked his partner. He barely thought about it, “He dismissed me.”

That word “dismissed” summed it up. I can remember squaring up with Nagato when I lived in Japan, hell, even now when I square up with him, the feeling is the same – dismissive. I’m not a threat, maybe nobody is for that matter. The utter confidence – how do we begin to achieve that?

There comes a point in training when the understanding of technique is not enough, the raw physical nature of training will not suffice, and to improve our ability means reaching beyond the way we perceive ourselves. Tough stuff.

The image I provided that night was a simple one, but useful for context. And context, we discover, is the key to understanding our greater role. Fudoshin, courage, is a difficult concept to explain, and even more difficult to pass on.

But he got a piece of it that night, so, I asked him, do you understand? He said, “It only makes for more questions.”