Wrist-locked.

The pain seared through the tendons in my wrist. All I could do was cry out the verbal white flag of "Tap! Tap! Tap!" I was beaten. And I was glad. I smiled and wiped the sweat from my forehead, opening and closing my left hand, palpating my narrow wrist to make sure all was in order. It was. "What was that?" I asked.

It was a failure of the most glorious and epic proportions. Off the controlled environment of the jiu jitsu mats, minimally I would be looking at a broken wrist. I would have been defending myself with one arm from a bigger, stronger and more skilled opponent. 

Later on, I found myself mounted by a black belt, arms pinned overhead. On the street, they would have been able to tee off on my head, and I would have been able to do little about it but cover my face and try to buck them off. In the jiu jitsu laboratory, it became an exploration of angles and leverage, on using one escape to set up another. 

The only actual destruction on the mats is of the ego, and that is therapeutic. Two lessons, both of which could potentially save my life, both of which were born out of failure. On the mat and off the mat, failure is a cause for celebration. It is failure that brings us closer to where we want to be.

Book review: The Obstacle is The Way, by Ryan Holiday

The Obstacle is The Way, by Ryan Holiday, is as practical is it is engaging. This is a road map for anyone who has struggled when dealt setbacks. It bills itself as a manual for turning trials into triumph, and it delivers on that promise with tactical information and examples from history. For anyone who encounters resistance in the creative process, I put this book in the company of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield in terms of its effectiveness.

Using the history-hardened tenants of stoicism, Holiday presents his strategy in three parts: perception, action, and will. An example of each:

1. PERCEPTION: "Discipline in perception lets you clearly see the advantage and the proper course of action in every situation." Here, he's talking about the stoic retreat to the "temple of reason" that is the logical mind -- seeing things for what they are, free of emotional baggage.
2. ACTION: "The one way to guarantee we don't benefit from failure--to ensure it is a bad thing--is to not learn from it. To continue to try the same thing over and over (which is the definition of insanity for a reason)." This is the need to iterate, to go out and fail faster so that we might improve quicker. 
3. WILL: " ... loving whatever happens to us and facing it with unfailing cheerfulness. It is the act of turning what we must do into what we get to do." Requires no explanation. I found this to be the most helpful section.

Do not mistake this book for a collection of platitudes and quotes. It is a battle plan. Putting that plan into action, however, is entirely up to the reader. But the work pays off.

Jiu Jitsu, journaling and practice for the sake of practice.

From my experience, the most rewarding pursuits in life have been practices. And I don't mean scheduled sessions leading up to games, meets or other sporting events. I mean the regular endeavors that define a person.

I have several that I maintain, two of which I'll write about here. One is journaling, which I do not so much to document my day, but as a meditative practice on what I did and how I can do it better. Filling those notebooks and seeing them neatly lined on a shelf gives me a gratifying feeling. Though the accounts contained in the pages are often unvarnished criticisms, the sheer volume is a testament to progress. 

My newest practice is Jiu Jitsu, which I've been steadily doing for eleven months now. For me, Jiu Jitsu, especially as a white belt, is a practice in humility and failure. Modern life and society insulate us from both. But it's impossible to stay in your comfort zone when someone twice your size is trying to dislocate your shoulder. Yes, you fail. Yes, you get humbled. You tap out more than you get submissions. But more important, yes, you get better.

But inherently -- though progress, humility and comfort with failure are all enriching -- the best part of any practice is that it is infinite. The journaling doesn't stop at the last page of the notebook. There's another waiting to be filled. The jiu jitsu player doesn't stop training when he or she reaches black belt. There is always more to learn, more variation to explore.

Practices are infinite. They take us as close as we will ever get to immortality. A practice is an art that imitates life, for the sake of art and life.

Six years ago today, the overhaul began.

Facebook showed me a face this morning that I barely recognized. It was a self-portrait, taken in a hospital bed, while doctor-prescribed morphine set my brain alight, and my appendix continued its slow melt into a puddle, flooding my bloodstream with potent bacteria. I looked like a half-ghost, one foot in the world of the living, the other in the world of the dead.

For most of our existence, barring providence, appendicitis was a sentence to a slow and painful death. I wasn't afraid of dying then. I had enough baseline medical knowledge to know that I'd walk out of the hospital, just as I walked in. What I didn't know is that I wouldn't walk out the same person.

The person in the picture was living on borrowed time. He had done most everything important wrong for the past four years. He had ignored what was essential. He had distracted himself with equal parts blind ambition and self-destruction. He was ignoring the billowing, black smoke pouring out of the engine and the oil change that was 10,000 miles overdue. It took the failure of an organ the size of his pinky for the entire system to start breaking down.

Most important, it took that failure for the overhaul to begin.

A lesson from Mother Nature on change.

Modern man has a problem with waiting. This cultural attention deficit poses a real problem when it comes to change. Meaningful change, the kind that's worth pursuing, doesn't happen overnight. 

While scratching away at my morning pages, I was riffing on the notion that nature is aesthetic perfection. Though man is a part of nature, our creations aren't always harmonious with this aesthetic. Why, my favorite question, is a subject for another post. 

In most instances, nature's most stunning beauty didn't arise in a matter of days -- or weeks, or months, or centuries for that matter. It took time. Lots of it. It was the steady, eroding force of the Colorado River that carved the Grand Canyon, the persistent movement of plate collision that gave rise to the Appalachian Mountains. 

I think, aesthetically speaking, where man and nature's creations diverge is the allowance for time. Granted, we don't have thousands of years to paint our masterpiece. But we can't wake up one day, expect to be a painter, and be one. As Pressfield would say, we must set the table for the Muses, always keep a steady fire going in the hearth, and show up. We need to let time have its way.