Hard and Soft
Two of my students practicing, 2021. Kodak Gold 200 film.
During COVID, things got weird.
A FedEx driver brought a check to my door, unmasked. Making conversation, I asked if they didn't make him wear one. "No reason to wear a mask for somethin' no worse than the flu."
I let it go. What I wanted to say: the flu still kills tens of thousands of Americans a year, even with easy vaccination. Before we had a vaccine, it killed half a million of us. We're so cushioned by decades of medicine and public support that we think we can't be hurt. He was handling the public a hundred times a day, and there was zero chance I'd convince him otherwise.
Society split into people-who-deliver-stuff and people-who-receive-stuff. Road rage went up. Murder went up 30% in a single year, the largest one-year jump the FBI has ever recorded. And I started keeping a gun in the car.
At first, it felt like wearing a mask: a simple precaution, a statement of how I approached the world.
Then it made my irritations more acceptable. Maybe I didn't have to be so fucking polite. Maybe the next texting, tailgating idiot who nearly swipes me gets a honk and a finger. Maybe he flips me back. Maybe I invite him to an open exchange of ideas.
Maybe I'd like that.
That wasn't me. Fear was making me someone I didn't like. Then I realized I'd already learned this lesson through karate.
I practice Okinawan Goju-ryu, an old-fashioned, non-competitive style. Its founder, Chojun Miyagi, named it for a line in the Bubishi, a text early karate masters revered:
The way of breathing is go (hard) and ju (soft), inhaling and exhaling.
Not "This is how you take a human being apart." Just "Breathing is like this." Which is to say, life is like this.
You can train as hard as you like. You can punch the makiwara, drive your fingers into bamboo, and condition your arms against a partner's until you're both bruised. You can drill prearranged sparring with a partner, but there's no free sparring. It's self-defense, not sport.
So how do you know if you're any good, without pressure testing? You don't. Hopefully, you'll never find out.
But I did.
In my mid-20s, a man in a bar parking lot came at me with a wrench. I blocked, backfisted, and broke his nose. For me, karate worked, and it still works for what it was designed for: self-defense against untrained attackers. Could I take on a trained MMA fighter? No. That's an entirely different thing.
Old-school karate creates people who aren't terrified of their fellow man.
When I put the gun back in the safe, I got my confidence back. I'm not saying I'd never carry again. Things change. But as one of the people-who-receive-stuff, I'm not in danger right now, except from myself.
Most gun deaths in America are suicides.
Those went up during COVID, too.