#210 - Fight
1 Family Photo, 1 Dad-Joke, Many Highlights
Family Photo: Water Fight
To celebrate a neighbor-friend’s birthday, the kids had a water fight at the park.
The water fight had no rules, but it settled into an equilibrium where three big kids walked around like Terminators (complete with sunglasses), using slow, measured steps in relentless pursuit of the little kids—completely unperturbed by any amount of water splashed back in their direction. The little kids, meanwhile, scurried around the big kids, huddled for cover, tactically retreated, and courageously attempted flanking maneuvers in futile opposition—like the non-Terminator cops in that movie—completely unaware that the big kids had higher-powered squirt guns than the little kids.
I thought the game would end in tears after some kid got hit too many times in the face, but they all chased each other around the park for two hours without a single complaint.
--
A pair of videos showed up in my Reddit feed a couple years ago. It stirred something in me enough to take a screenshot, adding the note, “This makes me feel something...I don’t know what.”
In the first, 1st MMA CONTEST AT 43YRS OLD... (Video), a guy in his 40s gets punched in his face a bunch by another guy (who also appears to be in his 40s), before one of them chokes the other one successfully enough to stop the fight. In the second video, Speech before deadly push through Afghanistan (Video), Captain Ryan B. Cohen informs his assembled Marines:
The tactical task to breathe fire has now been issued...you will breathe fire day in and day out for the next two months. You will breathe fire in your sleep. You will feel fatigue, you will feel fear, you will feel happiness, you will feel regret, you will feel sadness, and at the end of the day you will continue to breathe fire.
I’m struck by the contrast:
The 43-year-old thinks he’s a fighter. Maybe he is for the minute-and-a-half he’s getting punched. He risks making his face a bit uglier. Maybe that’s not so much given the base rate.
The Marines in Afghanistan may or may not think they can breathe fire. Either way, they’re in the fight. They risk everything. Cohen was awarded the Silver Star for his actions in the campaign.
--
On Friday afternoons, the place I do jiu jitsu has an open gym. 40-50 (mostly) middle-aged (mostly) guys from around the county gather to playfully beat the crap out of each other.
I think it’s important to call this activity rolling instead of fighting.
I know it’s not a fight. I always end up sore, and there’s an occasional bruise, but I’m not trying to get punched in the face. Maybe I’ll feel differently about that when I’m 43.
Last week I rolled with a college kid who’s trained at our gym for a few months. Looking at his cauliflower ear, I asked him how long he’d wrestled. “Just a little bit in high school,” he laughed, before grinding my body into the mat like a steamroller for five minutes.
An older guy at the gym, I think he’s 55, said the real fight is against Father Time. “I feel myself losing a bit of my strength every year,” he said. “Now I’m just holding onto the end of the rope for as long as I can.”
Dad Joke(s): Word Fight
Source: @NickCapper
Jiu Jitsu Fight
Source: @SpaceSkits
Highlights: Good Fight
What I Learned About Masculinity at Thai Kickboxing School by Dan Brooks
If you have about $1,300 and a way to get to Phuket, Thailand, you can live and train at Tiger Muay Thai & Mixed Martial Arts for a month and then fight another student, in a ring and in front of a crowd, for three rounds, or until one of you can no longer continue. I told my editors that if they sent me, I would write about the global combat-sports phenomenon that is Thai kickboxing and my own experience of Tiger’s notoriously grueling training regimen. Secretly my plan was to discover that I was a natural, with a paradoxically strong work ethic I would use to outcompete other men and comparably sized women, despite being, through no fault of my own, 48 years old. ... I didn’t want the formative experiences of my life to be behind me; I wanted to keep changing as a person and, as a body, to get better instead of worse. In other words, I wanted to resist the domination of age. Someday I may be elderly, and when I think about the vulnerability inherent in that condition, it seems similar to childhood in ways that make me want to put it off as long as possible. ... It was not yet 9 a.m., but the temperature was pushing 90 degrees and the humidity had put a permanent wave in my notebook. After the second round, I switched to the next bag because I was slipping on a puddle of my own sweat. When it was my turn to hit pads, the Thai trainer kept saying, “Chirt, chirt!” I thought it was a boxing term I didn’t know, until I realized he was telling me to put on a shirt. I was projectile sweating. ... “You fight good,” the trainer said to me. Immediately I recognized it as one of the most important moments of my life; I could feel it making up for years of childhood. He asked how long I was in Phuket, and when I told him I was leaving on Monday, he lost interest in me forever. I wondered, though, if he and Cartoon had been scheming to put me in a fight.
Obviously I would never do that. I was in Thailand for work, having organized my whole life around what I could get out of the particular arrangement of my brains, and I was six months shy of 49. Best-case scenario: I would win one and then fight until I found someone who would permanently stop me. I had a wife and a son and a good dog waiting at home. But it occurred to me that I could just not get on the plane. Some people don’t.
Play Is How Children Practice All Essential Human Skills by Peter Gray
Children are not designed to lift weights or run around tracks or swim back and forth in pools or operate those silly machines in fitness centers. They are designed to chase one another around, laughing and screaming until their sides are splitting, fight playfully with one another, climb trees, leap from rock to rock, and on and on. That is how children throughout history have always acquired strength, stamina, and the ability to move gracefully and effectively in a wide variety of adaptive ways. Some of this play involves a degree of risk, so this is also how children develop an ability to handle risk, an ability we might call courage. Let’s call this vigorous physical play. We see such play everywhere except in some parts of our world today where children are over-controlled by adults.
Notes from Lviv by Matt Gallagher
We taught basic urban-combat tactics and survivability to teachers, bus drivers, IT workers. Deceit marks any war, and the information battles in Ukraine have become case studies in real time. Yet I never got one whiff of duplicity in the confines of our training compound. These people were who they said they were, which is to say they are regular folks who want nothing to do with any of this but find themselves forced to act.
How do I know? If you’ve ever seen a middle-aged lawyer try to bound across an open field for the first time, you just do.
Then that lawyer does it again, and again, and again, and then, all at once, he’s capable. Because he must be. Every woman and man there said they’ll defend their homes if the war comes to western Ukraine. I pray it doesn’t, but they’ll be ready if those pleas go unheard. During our two weeks together, they gave our group their trust, their commitment. It’s a heavy thing, to pick up a gun in war. The choice, if it does come, belongs to them alone.
One trainee was a twenty-year-old student I’ll call Roman. (Ukrainian names have been changed to conceal their identities.) He proved a natural, kicking down doors and moving through rubbled terrain like a guerrilla. Still, he’d never fired a rifle before we took the Ukrainian civilians to a weapons range. After he squeezed the trigger a few times, putting rounds on target, I asked how he felt.
“There’s going to be a human being on that end,” Roman said.
“Yes,” I said.
“And that human being will have come here to shoot me,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay.”
Okay’s the right conclusion, I think.
Three Ways to Have Better Fights by Derek Thompson
[M]any relationships could benefit from asking three very brief questions in the heat of a conflict:
1. “Are we opening new tabs?” Too many fights happen when one hard conversation branches into several hard conversations.
2. “Are we venting or problem-solving?” Too many fights happen when one partner tries to have an emotional conversation and feels shut down by a barrage of unemotional practical suggestions.
3. “What if I tried to control only myself?” Many fights are exacerbated by you need to statements. I need to statements direct inward the urge to control.
The goal, Duhigg reminded me, isn’t to avoid conflict. It’s to recognize, at the highest level, what kind of conversation you’re actually having.
iamJoshKnox: Handwriting Practice!
I used some Claude/ChatGPT credits to create and publish a series of handwriting books under the pseudonym Dottie D. Eye. My author copies arrive next week, I’m excited to see how the books turn out.
Available on Amazon Where Books are Sold: Handwriting Practice for Kids Who Love... Dinosaurs!
Want to Be Interviewed?
I want to improve my interviewing skills: Please REPLY if you’d like to do a 30-minute interview with me for a Podcast that doesn’t yet exist.
Or book some time on my calendar if there’s anything else you’d like to chat about: https://calendly.com/iamjoshknox
Until next week, iamJoshKnox
Thoughts? Feedback?
😊Hit Reply and let me know😊