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WE ARE WARRIOR raaaarrrrggghhhh!!

martial arts

“After feigning my death, I went into the mountains and there, the things I had valued before fell away from me, and I found enlightenment.”

So sayeth the mighty warrior as he gazed into the eyes of the woman who he’d feigned his death for in order to liberate her to be free to marry the man she actually wanted to marry despite the fact they never did get married because the Iron Way did not permit love, not while duty was…

Anyway.  A few scenes later, having flown through the air and acrobatically fought in the name of justice on a lake of frozen ice, said enlightened warrior sadly added: “I have failed you again,” before doing the right thing by slaughtering fifty or so ninjas in order to kill a dude with a big sword.

(This was a very bad film.  Not even the presence of Michelle Yeoh could stop it being a very bad film.  It was also appallingly subtitled.  My Mandarin is now just about good enough to recognise when subtitles are lying, even if I can’t tell you what the words should actually be.)

Meanwhile, on the other channel….

“They came here!  They took our land!  They took our women!  We are men!  We will not stand by!  Though we are but few, we are strong of heart, and our swords yearn for blood!  TO BATTLE RAAAAARRRRGGGGHHH!”

Elsewhere….

“Warriors!  Pick up your weight and reach – that’s it reach! – reach for the sky and hold… three… two… one… and now into push-ups five six seven eight and that’s it again reach for the sky and hold three two….”

While in a different room smelling of pretty much exactly the same sweat:

“Learning karate has made me better at business.  It’s given me the confidence I never had before.”

To put it another way: blimey has the word ‘warrior’ got some modern cultural baggage with it.  From learning the way of the sword in order to obtain enlightenment through to finding meaning and definition through a culture of manly violence in which brotherly bonds are formed with each new scar, all the way round to corporate bullshit as ‘warriors’ get together to really lay siege to the thorny question of how to approach VAT in the next quarter; in every karate school where the students are made to do punishment push-ups in order to learn the way of the bushido – we’ve gone and taken the idea of ‘warrior’, packaged it up and tried to sell it for £14.99 a pop.

What’s lovely about all of this, of course, is that ‘warrior’ is not the same as ‘soldier’.  We don’t aspire to a cultural ideal of being soldiers.  Soldiers work as a team on missions that we may not have an overall strategic view on, and as a result are often faceless to our society.  We have a bad societal habit of doing this:

“Oh my god!  You just jumped two double decker buses while playing the Beatles greatest hits with a nose flute!  How’d you do that?”

“Well, I worked really hard at it for twenty years and had a team of dedicated engineers working with me to perfect my technique….”

“Oh.  Okay then.  I guess that’s less impressive, then.”

Collective stories ring far less in our ears, than tales of individual wonder, and are generally harder to sell.  Consequently, when we think of soldiers, we tend not to give much credit to the idea that seven men working together at the pinnacle of training and professionalism achieved an incredible thing for an idea that is important and dangerous.  Rather, we’re all about the individual dude, the story of one guy (usually male) who having become separated from the other six soldiers on the team, went on to mightily achieve mega things through the sheer power of their inner strength and warrior spirit.

A warrior is a mighty individual; soldiers are individuals who through training and teamwork become something different, which we struggle to package and sell in quite the same way.

Which is of course the great deception of this whole idea we have of the modern ‘warrior’.  Historically and basically – a warrior was someone who went around killing for a cause.  A lord, an idea, a government, profit, gain, family, ‘honour’, grubs – whatever.  A warrior was a soldier, before soldiers got given foot powder and it was suggested that you’d live longer if you got your mate to cover you while you ran for the trench.  In selling the idea of a ‘warrior spirit’ we often forget this.  In our language, being a warrior isn’t about killing someone dead as efficiently as possible.  It’s about learning something about yourself through the medium of a really pointy stick.  The individual is all.

I’ve been doing a martial art now for over four years.  And don’t get me wrong – I love it.  It probably has made me more self-confident, in as much as I am a woman living in a society where media revels in depicting women as potential victims just waiting to be stalked by violent men, and yes, in a culture where there is still an embedded understanding that men are more right than women, and if argument fails their being more right comes from being more physically intimidating.  I’ve not got time for any of that crap, and part of my not having the time for that crap comes from the fact I’m fairly confident I could kick it in the nuts on my way to the exit sign.  It’s also probably made me physically fitter, and being physically fitter is generally helpful for my mental wellbeing.

And sure, obviously, yes.  Whenever someone says to me ‘we’re going to do double-knife’ today, I’d be lying if a part of my soul didn’t jump and down shouting ‘WHOOOPEEE!!’  As exemplified, always, by kung fu panda.

But guys.  Let’s not go mistaking a few good habits and nice side-effects that come from regular practice as being the same as spiritual enlightenment.  Nor is our current notion of what ‘warrior spirit’ even means, necessarily a fluffy thing to aspire to.

Solving things with a big pointy sword rather than reasoned judgment?  Not so cool.  Finding brotherhood through the blood of your enemies?  Redeeming sins against you through the exercise of your honed will which masters both yourself and your environment?  Discovering your self-worth through pushing your body and mind to breaking point, emerging on the other side as a hardened bastion of steel?  Mastering the weakness of your mind to a pinnacle of utter self-confidence that takes no dissension?  Hum….

Unless they’re for a cause bigger than yourself, then these are all pretty selfish forms of self-worth, frankly.  Admirable in certain senses; but not necessarily contributing to the good of all mankind.  And it’s a simple truth that in this day and age, we are all very big on the value of the individual, and that’s grand, but it can often be at the expense of mankind as a whole.  Every brilliant detective who doesn’t need to work to be fantastic; every rogue agent for whom doing the right thing means betraying the team/torturing the guy who mustn’t be tortured; every ninja who embarks on blood-soaked vengeance after the wife and daughter are casually killed off on page 2 to provide narrative motivation (sigh) – hell, it makes for a great story of individual stuff, regardless of whether the individual in question is, in fact, an unspeakable arsehole whose actions hurt others and society.

‘Warrior’ isn’t merely a thing we associate with men either – it possesses qualities that we regard as inherently masculine.  A warrior does the ‘right’ thing by his ‘code’ no matter what.  A resurrected Viking who takes an eye for an eye; a superhero acting beyond the law because of his sense of justice.  A monk who found enlightenment on a mountain, but not so much enlightenment that they still mustn’t occasionally kill, which seems… contradictory.  One whose will cannot be bent.  One whose body and mind is iron.

And my god, if there’s one thing that scares me in life, it’s those whose bodies and minds are iron.  For that way lies absolute truths and absolute certainties that may serve an individual to finding their confidence, but damn the rest of us.

So!  If you wish to learn the ways of the samurai; if you’re interested in bushido; if you’re down with the notion that Shaolin monks can sit for longer in meditation because they’re physically fit; if you think sai are just feckin awesome dude – totally groovy.  Go forth and do that shit, because it’ll be fun, and almost certainly help you in both mental and physical ways to find new and exciting things that are true to you.

But dude.

When doing this, please think twice before signing up to any idea that you are learning to be a warrior.  Think about what that word means, and how it’s being sold to us, and once you’ve done that, do the very best thing of all, and sit back, and have a bit of a chuckle, and get on with being awesome without the baggage of being warrior, rrrraaarrrrggghhhh!