After a couple of decades doing karate in a country and dojo where the two baseline rules were:
- If you get knocked out, when you wake up, you carry on, and
- You clean up your own blood on the dojo floor
I had built up a number of injuries that in essence were permanent as far as I was concerned.
Some remain (badly broken nose and deviated septum means I wear a plaster to bed to be able to sleep/breathe, and have done so for about 30 years, I also have a couple of bones in each of my feet that are good weather detectors), but many that were “permanent” actually came back out in full force after I started to do Systema and then healed and became non issues or much milder ones.
Keeping in mind I had also some injuries from hiking with too heavy a bag, a car crash that I literally walked away from but would have killed me if the idiot that jumped a stop street at 2 am had hit my car a tenth of a second later, and other vagaries of my rather adventurous life, while fit, I was probably healthier in my early 40s than my early 30s.
The recent shoulder injury from a small but erroneous and unnatural movement reminded me that, as in life, those things that feel horrible and bad and hurt us, more often than not, could be used to better our situation or at least learn something useful so as not to repeat unnecessary errors.
In fact, if treated properly, this injury, which is in part anyway an echo of a dislocated shoulder suffered in training about three decades ago, can probably make my shoulder heal better than it has been over that period of time. And even if not, it can teach me to take more care in my movements being natural. Unhurried. Calm.
And of course, to heal it properly, using systema breathing techniques and the generous healing massage and touch of my wife.
As we enter the final part of 2025, I am being reminded daily to focus on all our healths, and to try to learn a better approach to everything; because it is unlikely I will stop being in a “rush”.
My brain works too fast.
My impatience is the result of that as well as knowing more often than not “patience” for most people, is really just an excuse for the witless.
Real patience I can do. The hunter’s and tracker’s gene is the same one my ancestors, including the ones in my still living memory, had.
And this is part of that. Learn to fill the time between me noticing the idiots slacking off, and their eventually activating themselves, only to fuck things up in three different ways I warned them about a month earlier, and their eventual hobbling towards the right answer, with alternative endeavours.
Or as Mr. Kipling wrote, though perhaps with a slightly different meaning as I intend it here, as I never had trouble doing it as I believe he meant it originally:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute, with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.
This post was originally published on my Substack. Link here
