Trying Tuesday (aka another essai)

Sparring

“Bow this way. Bow to your partner. Begin.”

Feet and fists fly by me as I shift my weight: front to back, side to side; I am watching, waiting, in a word: hesitating. We spend the last few minutes of each kung fu class this way, engaging in “no-contact” sparring. We pair off and assume a sparring stance, hands up as if to punch or block and feet planted in a wide stance for balance, yet ready to shift for a kick or evasion, and then we throw kicks and punches toward our opponent without actually touching them. We watch. We circle. We wait. We strike. We react. We reset. We try to intercept the message of our partner’s body and deliver one of our own. We use this small part of each class to integrate our forms into our natural reactions, to essentially become the forms that we have been living with in practice. We spar for a minute or so and then slide down to a new partner, bow, and begin again.

Though no score is kept and no contact made, I can tell that I always lose these matches.

The first couple of weeks I simply talked my opponents down. I would grin or giggle, say something silly or make an off-the-wall observation. My partners would shake their heads, trying to clear them of the babble that was cluttering up the space between us. I made myself utterly non-threatening and at the same time incapacitated my attacker. Then one day while working with a kids’ class, Sifu Paul barked out, “No talking during sparring!” He didn’t exactly cut his eyes at me, but I could tell he was hoping that I could take a hint.

Damn. Disarmed.

I vowed never to speak during sparring again, but sometimes my partners make this a real trial.

I sparred with an older man I had not met before. He complained to Sifu that my hair getting in my eyes was preventing him from making eye contact and was distracting him. I have no response to this.

At the next class, Sifu was running through his drill as we sparred, “Stay light on your feet, remember your fore block, watch their eyes, not their feet, watch your partner, try to anticipate their next move,” and I mumbled, “Can you ask them to stand still while you practice your sparring techniques?” The young blue belt across from me looked confused for a moment and then said, “Would you like me to?” I considered taking him up on it. Pathetic. I know. I declined and continued getting theoretically pummeled. Mouth closed. Hair out of my eyes. Not distracting.

I once had a partner with five eyebrow piercings and an almost threateningly quiet and serious demeanor settle into sparring stance and then turn his front hand palm up and flick his fingers up in a “bring it on” kind of gesture. I fell out of stance in my surprise and broke my promise to remain silent. “What is this, The Matrix?” Sifu rolled his eyes. Whether at me or my partner, I’m not sure. Back in sparring stance, I strangled the urge to mock my partner further, though he got his revenge by touching my face as we sparred – proving undeniably that he could move through my defenses with ease.

Another time I squared off with a student with whom I’ve been friendly in an acquaintance sort of way. He is obviously committed to his practice as a fighting art and is even a little scary in the force with which he executes his forms. His devotion seems child-like in its determined single-mindedness, and I tend to hold him in my mind as both adorable and psychotic. I waited, expecting him to put on his usual “mean” face as he turned to me, but instead he came up from his bow, raised one eyebrow at me, grinned, revealing ever so slightly his broken front tooth, and looked for all the world as if he was going to say, “So, what’s your sign, baby.” I was unable to recover in time to salvage the exercise, and my friend had the good grace to at least look abashed for his part in the debacle.

I’m surprised that Sifu continues to let me spar. While I wouldn’t cut that piece from my martial arts practice, it isn’t why I take the classes. I want control, flexibility, focus, stress-relief, a physical outlet, and the opportunity to learn something not just new, but outside of my experience entirely. Growing up, I had health problems that prevented my participation in sports or serious physical activity, so I became a watcher. I am accustomed to sizing up a person’s personality, their mental strength and weakness, their spiritual generosity and meanness. Learning to engage physically has felt like retraining my brain, and I enjoy the combination of mental and physical challenge that learning a new form presents.

So, considering I have chosen this course of physical activity, and I profess to enjoy it, I have to wonder why sparring provokes me to throw up shields. Is it facing someone as if you are going to hurt them? Is it the arrogance inherent in attacking someone? Is it the fear that I can’t do it well, so I may as well make it silly? Probably.

My daughter spars magnificently. She is all of 6, and I have seen her press a full-grown man, a brown belt, no less, back to the wall with the forward drive of her punches and kicks. As she faces someone easily twice her height, three times her weight, four times her age and as close to the black belt end of the spectrum as she is to the white, she furrows her brow in concentration. She scrunches her nose and bares her teeth like a rat, and her hands tighten into tiny fists of fury. She advances in a fluid flurry of motion, and I can’t help but notice that her hair, like mine, tends to fly in her face and obscure her eyes. Powerful. Confident. Focused. And, of course, just a little bit difficult to make eye contact with.

She has offered to teach me. I wonder whether she can. Can she teach me to fight with the fearlessness of a six year old? To engage life in this moment without thought to appearance or consequence? Am I too experienced to learn not to be intimidated by people who are larger or higher level than I am? Watching my daughter, I consider: what might it be like to face every task I undertake with sincerity instead of cynicism?

Trying Tuesday

In honor of the pursuit of happiness: an essay.

To the Marriage of True Minds

This morning I got out a fresh razor to shave my legs and when I took the protective plastic thing off of it, I saw that the blades were clogged with tiny red beard hairs. Damn it. It is alarming that after 10 years somebody can still catch you off guard like that. It is weird for me to wrap my mind around the fact that William and I are hurtling toward out tenth anniversary.

There is a lot of talk these days about what constitutes a marriage. Is it strictly between a man and a woman? Is it two consenting adults? I once asked a friend’s mother – how did she know that Stan was “the one.” How did she know she was in love? She said, “Merideth, when I got married, I didn’t know what love was.”

It’s been ten years. Do I know what marriage is? I feel a bit anxious about bragging on our ten year victory. After all, my parents were disastrously married for 15 years before they divorced. How will I know when I’ve made it? When can I breathe out that sigh of relief that I’m holding in? When we first married, I would wake up every day and say, “I love you this morning.” It unnerved William. Would tomorrow be different? Tomorrow is always different. Marriage is a daily commitment, but over the years it has come to be as natural to me as waking up in the morning. I rarely startle him anymore with a reminder of the tenuousness of life in general and relationships in particular.

For all that this is working out for me so far, I don’t think I would do it again.
In ten years, we have weathered a three month trip to Europe with no money, two children, living with my parents, traveling with his parents, moving across the state twice, the deaths of loved ones, two teaching certification processes, a masters’ degree, buying a house, refinancing a house, fluctuating sex drives – and not always compatibly fluctuating, running up credit cards, paying off credit cards, running up credit cards again, and of course those little daily surprises like peanut butter in the fridge (He doesn’t eat it – he doesn’t know where it goes.) and unexpected red hair in what you thought was a fresh razor. Life has happened to us. It shows on our faces. It is heavy in our hearts. I’m not sure anymore whether I could carry it by myself.

Marriage is different from friendship, but large enough to include it.

Marriage is different from love, but strong enough to create it.

Marriage is a trust defined by the participants, and what it provides most profoundly is belonging, an almost casual sharing of identity that most of us take so completely for granted that we don’t give a thought to what we might mean – all of the things we might mean - when we say “I do.” Certainly some services include the phrase “not to be entered lightly,” but we do enter it lightly. And often, we leave it heavily, shattered by the realization that we are not who we thought we were, and they are not who we thought they were. In light of this new knowledge, one can see why Michel de Montaigne would write that “Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.” It takes time and experience on the inside to know for yourself what marriage is and whether you and your partner can make it work. And right now, some people are not afforded a level playing field to find out. It seems so fundamentally wrong to deny someone the right to take this risk, to express this hope and belief in their beloved that things will work out as long as they have each other.

I want to say that to deny a person the right to validate their relationship in this way is cruel. I wish I could say it was unusual. Unfortunately, I have to settle for saying that it is ridiculous. That my hope and belief and joy in my marriage with William is somehow made less by according same-sex relationships the same right to build marriage for themselves is - well, I can’t think of another word for it – ridiculous.

In Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court expressed similar outrage towards the state’s ban on interracial marriage, reaffirming the sovereignty of individuals in choosing a marriage partner:

Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State (Warren).

Our country is struggling over a definition of marriage that everyone can live with. How about this: Marriage is surprises, boredom, laughter, continuity, struggle, stability, interdependence, validation. I know it lacks something in the gender specification department. I consider that a positive. Marriage is a public affirmation of a deeply personal ideal. The notion that this ideal might be defined differently by different individuals should be neither surprising nor threatening, and I can only think it is an extremely weakened personal ideal that cannot withstand the coexistence of variation.

On the one hand, one might argue that true marriage happens to you whether you have a piece of paper from the state to support it or not. But many couples are working for their marriage to happen without the support of the 1,049 federal laws extending rights, privileges and benefits to their fellow married citizens (OGC). In a world fraught with burdens that marriage is meant to lighten, they struggle with one extra impediment to their right to pursue happiness.

Remember me?

Hello all. Just thought I'd post for the unrequited faithful that check in here once a... month? to see if I've actually posted. For those who don't know, I started a job in January teaching 10th grade English. It has been stressful and strange being back in the classroom, but I think I will get the hang of it eventually.

I am about to head out for my annual summer visit to Vernon, so I will be without internet for a week or so. Blah. I'm running around the house packing and picking up and generally getting distracted at every opportunity.

I've been in a bit of a tizzy over how to use/what to do with this blog. I have some essays stored up that may never see publication in any other venue, and some ideas for a few more. I'm poor at linking to things, but occasionally get the itch to call attention to something unusual. Don't know. I'm going to give it a think over the next week or so and try to make a decision (the horror).