Four Life Lessons I Learned From Being Bad at Martial Arts
Losing a fight can be quite clarifying
It’s hard to overstate the clarifying power of losing a fight. For the last few years, I’ve kept a standing appointment to lose several, mostly on weekday mornings.
My preferred genre of fight-losing comes in a gym for jiujitsu, a martial art some UFC fighters employ when they grapple on the ground. It’s wrestling, basically, with a mean endgame.
I should say right here that I’m quite bad at jiu-jitsu. If the sport were high school, I’d be fumbling my way through an undistinguished freshman term. But since I took it up a few years back at 39, as a father of two with a demanding job and overwhelming schedule, it has become a kind of lifeline for me.
In these wrecked times, my jiu-jitsu practice has consisted of sparring with my wife, who took up the sport with me, in our basement. It’s often the best part of my day. Confronting my own lack of mastery of this martial art — and trying like hell to get better at it — has taught me some vital stuff about cognition, privilege, and, above all, humility.
The true meaning of “humility”
The film director Guy Ritchie also trains in jiu-jitsu, and he recalled in an interview that at first people…
