Posted by Six months ago I started Jiujitsu. I didn’t have any particular motivation or inspiration to do it – I actually have always wanted to – simmering below the surface of my day-to-day life has been a restlessness and a a difficult-to-settle desire to learn how to better improve my ability to fight. Not because I want to fight; that’s ridiculous. Rather there is a feeling I’ve always known that existed but that I’ve never felt where you are at more of an ease and a comfort with your own body and it’s capabilities.
On the topic of your own body, I have spent nearly all of my 48 years feeling like I had been given a body that wasn’t symbiotic with my goals. I’m oversized in nearly every activity I love; skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, running, soccer. The list goes on and on. Jiujitsu is the first thing I’ve done that has made me feel adequate with my body. Even embracing my size as beneficial to my journey and looking at it as a an asset and not a grotesque physical deformity has been a positive for my mental well-being.
I’ve signed up for my first tournament on October 12th. I will be doing all I can to prepare for it, and that will include invoking some interesting advice I got from someone on an internet forum that is not at all related to jiujitsu – write it down. write it all down. Start making physical notes on what went right, but mostly what went wrong in every session. Refer back to these and think about what I need to work on and where improvements can be made. I will be doing that and posting some of those thoughts here now.
The truth is, improvement is everywhere in Jiujitsu. At times it feels like a shell game, where just when you think you understand something, a slight hipshift, the scoop of an elbow, the burying of a head in your chest scuttles any idea you had instaneously and you’re beginning from ground zero. It is at once both the most humbling thing I’ve ever partaken in (especially as a guy that was good at pretty much every single traditional sport as a kid) and the most engaging and intriguing. You are improving, despite on some evenings feeling like all of the presented evidence is to the contrary. The journey and the growth and self-exploration that takes place is like a drug. Every session is another dose, keeping the flame lit until you can get to the next one.