Making Sense

We were drilling a sweep in jiu jitsu this morning and someone (I didn’t see who) had apparently done one of the steps out of order and placed a foot or hand in the wrong spot. The teacher said something very instructive:

“Everything is in a specific place for a specific reason. We do the steps in a certain order for a reason.”

With that, another massive piece of what I think people find so fulfilling about jiu jitsu fell into place for me: things make sense here.

We live in a random, disorderly world. That’s part of what makes maintaining a positive mental attitude so challenging: anything could happen at anytime for any, or indeed no, reason.

In jiu jitsu, though, things make sense. Not unerringly, of course; nothing is an absolute. By and large, however, some truths hold out:

• Experience beats raw power
• Patience beats loss of control
• Leverage beats strength
• Hard work pays off

These truths and others like them likely form, for many people, a core of what they love about jiu jitsu and what keeps them coming back. Regardless of whatever else is going on in our lives and the world at large, we know that we have a place we can come back to where our hard work will pay off, incrementally over time, in improvements in our game and a larger understanding of something that really matters to us.

Hard for No Reason

When I was a kid, I had a paper route. Man, how old does that make me feel? Pretty old. But then, I’m 34, which is a weird age to be. It’s not old enough to be old, but not as young as I used to be. More on that another time, maybe.

So I had this paper route. I had it for years. I was okay at delivering papers, which is a weird thing to be “good” at. The margin between the best paper delivery person in the world and just “okay” at it is probably pretty slim.

I’d always been an early riser and the paper route just made that already-formed behavioral pattern pretty much irrevocable. I loved being up before everyone, before the sun, even. To this day, I love being up early (which is good, because I’m pretty much incapable of sleeping late). I love the opening line in that Fiona Apple song “Not About Love,” “The early cars/already are/drawing deep breaths past my door…”

I always feel like I’m subtly getting over on the world as I walk the streets, watching “the steam rise up out of the grill like the whole damn town is about to blow,” smelling the coffee brewing in the bodegas, hearing the dull thud of the stacks of papers being tossed from the backs of delivery trucks…

Growing up in the ‘burbs of New York, as I did, one of the benefits of being up early is that I always knew if school was going to be closed in the winter. Some mornings it would be obvious: 6 inches of snow of the ground and no sign of plows = no school. Other mornings, it’d be more of a showdown: I’d make my rounds in the snow, hearing the reports come in of one-hour delays, then two-hours…white-knuckling it until the school finally closed or, fists clenched and teeth gritted in defeat, we marched to the busses.

Then there were those mornings that I called “cold for no reason.” These mornings were cold. They were cold, cold, cold, cold, cold. They were cold and clear and you could still see the stars in the pre-pre-dawn and you could see your breath and there never seemed to be enough layers to keep me warm. (I learned later that these clear mornings were so cold because when there are clouds overhead, they hold in heat from the ground.)

I called these mornings “cold for no reason,” because when it was bitterly cold and there was snow and we got the day off, well, that was a good tradeoff. But on those cold, clear days, there was no light at the end of the tunnel. The only reward I got for being cold for the however long it took to deliver all the papers was the howevermuch I earned while doing it. The margins were slim; I recall every lost customer felt like a huge dent in my finances.

I came in, warmed up, went to school, got my ass kicked in wrestling, got okay grades, and the paper route didn’t really matter much. It wasn’t the hardest thing I’d ever done. It was just hard for no reason. Sometimes things are like that. Sometimes your partner puts on an Ezekiel choke too hard and your jaw is sore all day and the only thing you learn is that you should have tapped instead of trying to defend like you did and it’s hard for no reason and you move on.