Random

 I have an old, dear friend, who is a great HEMA enthusiast, and very passionate about his opinions.  I don't always agree with what he says but I admire the vigor with which he argues his point.  Anyway, he posted something really interesting this morning:

"Thought:

Much like my former attitude on Katas/forms/reglas, I used to feel negatively towards demonstration wushu/sword dances/sword tricks/demonstration flourishes. A lot of that was edgelord 'go straight at them, and don't waste time learning shit you'll never use in a real fight' bullshit, and I retract it wholesale.

Play with your toys (responsibly). Learn to juggle your knives and hatchets if that's a thing you want to learn. Contact juggle your polearm. Memorize Madmartigan's longsword flip-catch. Do interpretive dance with your Montante. Take up the flaming version of your sabre or flail and show it off at Burning Man.

Fucking get weird with it.

Just play with the damned things all the bloody time.

[I hate that I have to explain that you should use blunt and purpose-built analogues and training simulators, and not sharp or loaded weapons for such play, but there's always that one asshole].

But Why?

Because in play, demonstration, and pursuit of artistry the fighter memorizes the tool's physical properties and adds it to their neural body schema for future reference using dopamine, the most powerful memory aid in the homo sapien arsenal, bar none.

By constantly manipulating the tool in ways that are both challenging and fun, activities which create dopamine, you are making that object familiar to your nervous system, such that when you pick it up, it will get "equipped" into your body schema as a *part of you*.

Your body schema is your mind's "map" of your body, built through your experience in using it your whole life through. It is this mental diagram that your body uses to compare against the inputs from your senses of balance and proprioception to tell you how *precisely* fucked you are when a judoka (or just your well-trained daughter; god bless you mijita, you done good) drops their weight with a fistful of your lapel during a drill.

Studies have shown (I do have a good citation for this somewhere, I swear- I'm just not digging through my drive for a facebook post) that tools can be added to the body schema- and I personally hypothesize that this can be extended even to vehicles and heavy equipment that one operates as being perceived by the mind as "part of self" for the purposes of interpreting sense inputs and manipulating the spatial dimensions of the equipment itself.

You see this with folks who do precision tricks like screwing the caps onto Coke bottles with backhoes and front end loaders.

A dance of milimeters, at operating speed.

And I do mean dance. The venn diagram of skills and aptitudes understood to benefit one greatly in both combat and dance has been a circle for most of human history for a reason.

Play, demonstration, and artistry are important parts of healthy martial culture because they permit for internalization of the combatant's panoply of tools, and the weapons' rapid and permanent addition to the fighter's body schema in a way that is not demoralizing or unnecessarily arduous. You learn *fastest* when you are having *fun*, period.

Topic doesn't matter.

Fun makes you remember it best. [That or trauma, but who wants to learn like that ? Hint: fucking nobody, that's who].

Besides, play is *fun*- and that's reason enough, in and of itself.

"Go. Play. Have Fun!"

-Shredder, in Secret of the Ooze."

Now, I think I understand the usefulness of forms, and fancy weapons demonstrations, but I'm glad my buddy has come to the same conclusion, albeit by a different route.

In other news, I'm back to my regular dayshift!! This makes me very happy, but I'm interested to see how I will cope fitting everything I've been doing into my "normal" schedule. I feel like I've come a long way in the last 4 months, in terms of getting exercise/eating properly/getting all my work done. But I've also worked by myself a lot for the last 4 months, so it was easy for me to do 200 push ups during my shift, or eat whenever I needed to, or practice my forms in the middle of an empty space.

But, I'm determined. I'm prepared. And I have support.