Oh Everest, My Everest

My last couple of classes have been good practice for me in (a) getting dropped quickly, (b) getting hit "gently" in the face, and (c) trying to achieve mushin, the state of newborn-like fearlessness and extreme readiness. Of course, I was only successful in doing (a) and (b) skillfully, because they both require only one real skill: minimizing the contact my head has with offending hard surfaces (namely, the floor or somebody's fist). That skill is pretty instinctive, I'd say. Mushin, on the other hand, is a lot more like a pipe dream for me right now. As I learned the hard way, I'm going to have to practice all of the basic blocking motions with another person a thousand more times in order to commit them to muscle memory, which is Step 1 towards extreme readiness (obviously). At this point, it seems like that day will never come because we practice this way so infrequently. Regardless, I spent a lot of my last class concentrating on the newborn-like fearlessness part, which is a mistake I will not make again, if I can help it. Spending all that energy on unfounded fearlessness meant also spending a lot of time getting kicked, punched, and generally smacked around without much (or any) defensive action to mitigate the blows.

I shouldn't complain, though, because I didn't get the worst of it. This older fellow in the class was practicing a blocking technique with me, and when three focused blocks from him warranted more spirited jabs from me, I started worrying less about controlling my punches and more about making them realistic... since he was going to block them anyway. (Right? Right?) That was when his completely unforeseen brain fart occurred and he just didn't step out of the way or deflect my fist. I made pretty good contact with his nose - VERY UNEXPECTEDLY - and watched in horror as it turned bright red. It was the kind of red your nose turns when you're about to cry. He didn't cry, but instead paused for a minute until the pain passed, and then placed a hand on my shoulder and leaned toward me like a person about to share a hefty secret. "You know," he said, "I've never been in a fist fight my whole life, if you can believe that." At first I thought he was just embarrassed and trying to make excuses, because he was, after all, turning bright red. But he continued: "You're the first person to ever hit me in the face!" Then he announced the same information to everybody else. (There were only two others there, including the instructor.) He just seemed so tickled by the whole thing, simultaneously shocked and tickled. I guess if I were a man with fifty odd years of living under my belt and the first time I ever got hit in the face was by a young lady - a girl in comparison - I would be pretty shocked and tickled as well.

His nose stayed Rudolph red for the remaining half hour of class. I'm just glad it didn't bleed.