There’s something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. By doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to all things. –Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure.
Sacriface
You won’t believe the difficulty I face this year, being both a college athelete and a Ph.D. researcher in computer sicence. It is difficult enough to be either one of the two, but being both at the same time has given me the most challenging year of my life so far. Let me just list the roles I have to fulfill:
- Research in computer science, working on multiple projects at the same time, with long coding and debugging sessions daily and struggles with research ideas.
- Teaching in computer science, being a teaching assistant that manages about 80 students and lead a 2 hour discussion session every Friday morning.
- Giving advices to undergraduate students in career and in academia.
- Daily boxing training in conditioning and cardio (includes at least 5 mile run, some sprints, and sets and sets of calisthenics at around 5:30 AM).
- 4 days a week, training in boxing techniques in addition to the strength and conditioning training.
- Hard sparrings three weeks before the boxing game.
- Mentally and physically prepare (that includes cutting weights, restricting diets) for the fight.
At this level and intensity, I have almost to none social life, no comfort food, or I should say, no comfort at all. I fight against fatigue, against self-doubt, walking a path that many of my peers don’t comprehend–some even pointing fingers at it.
All these commitments and hard work, or I should say, sacrifice, results in a loss. Yes, even though I was in the blue tank have my hand high, I lost in the end, and that day it broke me. I was in tears after the match, not because I was afraid or hurt, but because I felt that I let people cheering for me down, and I was questioning all these commitments and sacrifices: all these efforts, days and nights, of taking the risk of have your face being punched and your brain shocked, and now this? Yes I didn’t quit in the fight and I never gave up, but the burden of a loss saddened me deeply, making me question everything about this difficult journey.
Today is the day I sit down and reflect on this journey. It is usually pointless to philosophizing, as I will later recount in this article; however, if you take a loss without reflecting on it, you never grow. Hence I must regroup and reactivate my fighting spirit, after all.
What does not kill you makes you stronger. –F.Nietzsche.
The definition of sacrifice, which is the title of this section, is an act of “slaughtering an animal or surrending a possession as an offering to a divine figure”. What am I sacrificing for in this context? I used this word rather naturally, but what does it entail? answering this question could provide insights on why I pursue this challenging and often discouraging path.
The Question of Why
A Man who has a why can bear almost any how. – F.Nietzsche
When you face a major setback in life (losing a fight is one, having all the close friends and school mates witnessing your loss is a major setback on morale) you may want to give up. At this split second, when all your efforts have failed you, there has to be something that keeps you in the game, fighting, the why: we all need a reason to hang on and continue fighting; otherwise what’s the point of doing all this? Immediately after the fight, I was broken and had a difficult time grasping the why. If a man has no why, there’s no point in continue doing it; if you push this to extremity, this results in the absurdity that Camus talked about when he started The Myth of Sisypus with the topic of suicide.
You see, I have maintained a strenous training routine and strict diet weeks leading to the fight, shredding 15 pounds in 3 weeks while maintaining all my challenging school duties. I wake up every morning, doing cardio and conditioning until failure: At 5 PM or earlier in the morning, when the day is still dark, I force myself to get out of the bed, quickly finishing up a banana, and with the clear understanding that the day leading up is challenging and demanding (or simply, “it’s gonna suck”). Yet I was too occupied to think about the “why”. During the training there’s only the coach’s “keep going” that instinctively help me push through, but there’s no fundamental reasons. It may not be necessary, even, to have a reason, or the reason is too obvious: you get into a sport and the goal is winning. It may be a little strange to the common years, about the fundamental reason, but this I find is a characteristics of mine: I have always craved for something fundamental. You can see that I enjoy philosophy, so this results in my questioning of the root cause for fighting. Of course you want to win, playing a sports, but at my age, almost end of my 20s, what’s the point of doing a sports at which I’m not going to have a career in, where I probably can’t even imagine going to the very top (regionals, nationals, etc.)?
In the end of a boxing match, if you win, you take back a trophy, a medal, or a belt, so when the coach ask me “how much do you want it, Fred?” at first I think about these trophies, but when I think about them I become demotivated–there has to be something higher; yes we are gladiators in the ring, fighting for personal glory, but what’s the point of it all? Clearly for me it is not the belt that I want. I want something higher. The first time I joined the boxing club on campus, among other students who are newbies, the coaches address us and say “boxing can be an outlet for people”. That maybe true, but that’s for casuals, but now we are real fighters, competing in the ring in a high pressure and high demanding situation, there has to be something more–if you just want an outlet, you go hit the bags, no problem, but why bother getting punched in the face? (assuming you are not masochistic, which I am not)
Then people say that fighting is for broken people dealing with their trauma, a point made vehemently in the book The Figher’s Mind, and this is partly true. Indeed, surveying through the history of boxing and MMA, you can tell that lots of people with troubled childhood use fighting as a way to alleviate their trauma. I do have some traumatic experience in my adolescent years, especially of rejection, loneliness, and being bullied, but hearing some fighters’ stories and their upbringings, my trauma is in no way comparable, for at least I have a loving family to support me back then. Nevetheless, deep down I believe this is one of the reasons why I am attracted to this sport, although not the main one.
Lost in this quest of reasons, now my memory goes back to the week leading to the fight, and I start to get a glimpse of the main reason, when I feel the most calm during a morning run at the Getty trails near UCLA.
Spirituality in Fighting
In the week leading to the fight, instead of doing my usual sprints and conditioning, I tried to prepare myself mentally; the fight is urgent so I didn’t have the time like right now to reflect on the “why”. In the book Breath, an autobiography of the Brazillian Jujitsu legend Horace Gracie, Horace Gracie recalled that when he first fought in Japan, he went to the mountains to connect with the spirit of the Samurai, so I thought I’d give it a try to go to the mountains. The closest one to campus is the Getty trails, a beautiful mountain trail near the 405 high way, on the opposite of the Getty center. So I decide to give it a shot–maybe I will find something there. Now reflecting back, I think this is where I get my enlightenment.
In the morning of the Wednesday leading to the fight, at around 5AM, I left my apartment and took a jog to the Getty trails. The day is dark, but the 4 mile jog to the trail ennsures that when I reach there, the sun will rise. On my jog, I was listening to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No.10 instead of the usual mix of hiphops and rocks. I was calm, relaxed, and on my way there I ran with an ethereal sensation. At zone 2 cardio, with classical music, this is the moment where runners describe their runners high. You have to try it out if you haven’t before–it’s exhilarating!
When I reach the trail head and jog to the top over those steep slopes, I witnessed the sunrise from top of the hill–a rare view for me. The weeks leading to this I would do my strength and conditioning in the gym, a closed environment, but now, alone in the (semi)-wilderness, I see the crimson sun rising above the horizon of the LA mountains, and for the first time in a long time, an almost religious, and certainty spiritual experience emerged. I stopped to admire the beauty of nature, and when the sun rose and everthing in the mountain and the road were under its glory, I walked further down the trail, and I saw a white little cross, stretching a little inclined on the ground, among the wild grasses; now the sun is on its top right, shining golden bright.
I couldn’t help but stood still, as Mahler’s symphony No.10 in F sharp reached the Adagio, and despite my lack of a religious background, I stared at the cross, having my hands crossed, and without any pretext, I started to pray. I prayed that God give me the strength, courage, and wisdom, not just in this fight but also in my way forward. It has been a very challenging year and for a moment I took refuge in this peaceful moment. My mind went completely empty and I started to shadow box–an act of practicing your boxing moves by yourself, while imagining an opponent–which now felt more like dancing than boxing. I was completely relaxed and I was in the flow; I was one with the wind, the sun, the smell of the grass. I saw an butterfly landing on the branch near me, laying still, almost watching me as I shadow boxed.
Now I reflect upon this and I can say the following:
Fighting for me is spiritual
Of course, when you are fighting another person rather than shadow boxing, and especially in a ring among the crowd, there’s the subtantial danger of being punched in the face, injuries and knock outs, but I am sure there are lots of overlaps, especially for those competing at a higher level. More experienced fighters like to say that they “read their opponents” and “stay in the flow”, so there could be some connections here, ones that I have yet to discover due to my current lack of skills. If this is true, then I think The ring in this case becomes not just a competition ground, but an altar; the fighters sacrifice part of their physical well-being, their whole heart and spirit, and in exchange, they sobtain a temporary elevated state of mind, and this elevated state may never be experienced by non-fighters. In this perspective, fighting becomes spiritual, even religious. Hence it is indeed proper to use the word “sacrifice”!
So I ask myself again, “why? why are you willing to sacfice this much for fighting?” I say to myself:
I am a warrior, fighting for me is spiritual, and I fight to get closer to the Way.
which may sounds more mystical and perhaps with a flavor of the eastern philosophy. When coaches ask me “how much do you want it?” I was baffled, but when I ask myself “why?” I say, “because I want to comprehend and experience the Way, I want to master it and be in the flow”. That’s my ultimate goal, not some trophies, but an elevated state of the flow–and this is only possible with consistent hard work, dedication, and sacrifice, and with the improvement of skills and accumulation of experience, at which you can be in a hightened and relaxed state even under high pressure, like Muhammad Ali.
Being In the Moment
Speaking of the Way, here I must reference two more quotes from the book Hagakure, the Book of the Samurai, written by the samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo:
The way of the Samurai is One of Immediacy. It is bad when one thing becomes two. One should not look for anything else in the Way of the Samurai. It is the same for anything that is called a Way. Therefore, it is inconsistent to hear something of the Way of Confucius or the Way of the Buddha, and say that this is the Way of the Samurai. If one understands things in this manner, he should be able to hear about all Ways and be more and more in accord with his own
I tend to overthink, and this may be a common pitfall for many who pride in their “intellectual works”. For this I paid dearly in the sports of boxing, where I usually fight more experienced, but faster reacting fighters, and I think this is one of the main reasons why I lost my first match. During the match my opponent just kept charging at me with nonstopping punches, while I was trying to wrap my head around techniques to keep him at distance. If I had followed with a basic principle of throwing jabs, moving heads and moving around the ring, or just matching or surpassing his intensity, I should have done a lot better. However, during the fight, my mind was cluttered with many different possibilities, which results in inaction.
in boxing and in many martial arts, however, thinking must be fast and reactions immediate, without hesitation, for otherwise you pay dearly. This is very different from the usual intellectual work we do at school, and in a way a good practice for me. Now I can almost imagine Musashi Miyamoto shouting at me “don’t think, fool, just strike!”. It is not the existence of fear that hampers me; after getting punched many times, confusion overtakes fear, and it is now a game of will only. When it is the time for “stand and bang”, one must commit fully, but not in a rigid way–in the flow. The opponent is the surging wave in the ocean and you must adapt to the ocean in different levels. This I remeber as an excerpt from Geroges St. Pierre’s book The Way of the Fight.
Coming to this realization, it now becomes more clear to me why I fight and how I should improve myself further. I am a warrior and I will keep fighting! This is now in my nature.