Why I train

Over the years I have studied koryu budo, many people have asked me why I train. I never seem to have a good answer for them. I remember one American teacher's wife in particular became really impatient with my standard answer ("I don't know"). Of course, she was sort of drunk at the time, but maybe in vino veritas.

Out of curiosity, I just put "why I train" in a search of these blog posts. I got about half of all of the entries in response. This suggests that (1) there is more than one answer to the question, and (2) these answers are subtle and complicated.

Going back to the beginning of my training, one reason I have not addressed very much in my other posts comes up. I was a fencer from my college days. I enjoyed it, but having only taken it up for a few years (instead of say, from high school), I was not that good at it. I would have LOVED to have started in high school, but since I grew up in a very rural area with very limited opportunities (on, seriously, ANY level), there simply was no opportunity to emulate my TV and movie heroes - Zorro, or The Three Musketeers, or Basil Rathbone (take THAT, Errol Flynn). Instead I watched movies (when possible) and read lots of books. I was very interested, as a kid, in stories about western chivalry (information on Asian culture was as sparse as anything about fencing where I grew up).

In any case, I moved to the Big City and after about a year of finding my bearings, I began fencing at Santelli's in the West Village. This was in the early 1980's, when New York was struggling to put its financial house in order, and the mean streets were definitely meaner than they are now.

One of my colleagues at the salle had all of these books on Zen. He first lent, and eventually gave, me all of them. I read them. Some, as I found out later, were not worth much, but others were classics. There was something comforting in the idea that one had to let go of basically everything in order to find peace. In my world, at the time, where literally anything bad could happen at any moment, these were very valuable ideas. The evidence was available practically everywhere I looked - the subway platform, where someone was pushed, or jumped, in front of a train; the kid who was murdered outside the deli on Broadway while the workers inside were too afraid of the commotion to call the police. Stories from people I met about their being mugged at knife point, or beat up. Letting go, especially of the fear of everyday life in dangerous surroundings was, I felt, a key to survival.

But there was something else. It is very difficult for people, including women, nowadays, to fathom the everyday gauntlet of stuff a young woman living on her own in NYC in the 1980's had to endure. I'm talking about daily harassment - all the time. There was the old guy who ran the elevator at the office building where I worked who tried to grope me every time I was alone with him. The men I worked for would daily tell me what a "good girl" I was. One married executive tried to force his way into my apartment by way of the noble guise of offering to take me home after an office event. There was no way to complain because there was no one to complain to. Rules and laws regarding workplace harassment did not exist. Women where I worked would comfort each other - or, in time-honored fashion, they would get married and quit for what they hoped was the safety of suburbia.

In addition, complete strangers in the street called me a "monkey-faced bitch", or threatened to "fuck me up" for no particular reason - maybe they were just having a bad day? Nowadays, women launch Twitter movements because construction workers say hello to them, or, maybe ask them to smile. Seriously, people, you have no idea.

So I would go to work, go to the salle, go to the movies, go on dates, go to rehearsal (when I had one) and come home, seething with impotent rage. I mean full-on, howling rage. All of the Zen books in the world were not enough.

I took up iaido because, one night, I saw the man who would become my teacher perform a demonstration at an art movie house on Bleeker Street. It wasn't just beautiful - it was serene. All the same, I thought about it for two years, because I knew there would be huge changes in my life if I decided to pursue it. When I eventually did start training, I discovered several important things. One was that I could learn to express (at least on a crude level) the beauty that I saw in my teacher. The next was that I was learning tactics and strategies to deal with potential situations. The things I was learning in that regard had nothing to do with carrying a sword around - those lessons apply practically anywhere, as any experienced iaidoka can tell you. The third was that the sense of palpable rage that I often felt from the circumstances of my daily life at the time was somehow mitigated. Did I fantasize about decapitating some asshole whom I had never met who threatened to rape me for no particular reason? You betcha. But not as often as I was able to just let the whole thing go. It's not that I felt sympathy for someone else's anger (hell no). I was actually able to feel nothing at all.

New York is, overall, a much calmer (and duller, for that matter) place now. I am older, and so I am not nearly the target for unwanted attention that I used to be. Most happily, work culture has changed to the point where men in particular are compelled (for the most part) to be more polite. But there are still times, as when I am on a slow-moving rush hour train and someone vents their frustration, whether on me, or some other passenger, when I remember the value of what I am learning - how to have a calm mind. And seeking that sensibility is one of the most important reasons why I train.