A world so small, a heart so large

A few days into the EMT-B class, our instructor suggested that we get a scanner so we could listen in on medical reports, and learn from them. We get relatively few calls out here in the middle of nowhere, so we need to learn from as many sources as we can. Listening in to the radio reports, and especially the flight medics, we could hear how they give the reports, what interventions they have done, and a variety of other details not readily available elsewhere.

One of the first things we learned is that the flight medics are fantastic. They give their reports by the book, head to toe, easy to understand and follow. A good model for us, to hear that pattern over and over, the rhythm and flow of the report giving us a mental template to use in acquiring the information to give our own patient reports.

Another thing we learned early on is that we can recognize the voices of most of the ambulance personnel, so we know who is going on the call. This does a couple of things. One is to give us further information about each of them, their ability to be focused and calm, the clarity and completeness of the information they provide, adding to the level of trust we have in them when we work together. It also lets us know who to worry about, sometimes, depending on the situation they are going into- or on the road conditions.

We also hear a much wider variety of situations than we've gone to ourselves.

We have gotten into the habit of turning the scanner on when we hear someone get toned out for something that sounds like an interesting EMS call. We run through the call either in our heads, or sometimes, if we're both listening, with each other. Does the location of the call give us any information? Is this somewhere they have been before? What would you do first? What should we be concerned about, with that mechanism of injury? We'll visualize and/or verbalize the assessment we would do if we were on scene. It's decent practice for us, and more than once, we've ended up with a similar call relatively soon after hearing one on the scanner.

So last week, when we heard a call for someone who fell from a tree, we turned the scanner on, and followed the incident as long as we could.

My first thought was that I was glad that I didn't know anyone that age who lived in that location.

I was concerned for the patient. It didn't sound good. They called for a helicopter before arriving on scene, to get the flight team going and ready to fly. Called in an engine to set up a landing zone nearby. This is a common precautionary measure, but this time, it sounded like it might be necessary. There are so many injuries possible with a fall.

We don't get a lot of detail on the scanner unless we pick up a flight medic; since the radio system was upgraded a few months ago, the local ambulances give their reports on a frequency we can no longer pick up. This time, it turned out that the helicopter couldn't fly due to bad weather, so they had to transport by ground. Once they were loaded to go, we didn't get any further information over the radio. All we knew was that the suspected injuries were serious.

As we turned off the scanner, our thoughts and hearts were with the patient, hoping things would go well and he would be okay.

They didn't.
He wasn't.

Usually, we never know how EMS calls turn out. Privacy laws prevent us getting further information, unless we happen to know the patient personally, and hear things through friends or family directly.

The thing is, I don't actually know where every person I know around town lives.
And I definitely don't know where they all work, or where they might be at any given time of day.

Turns out that this patient was someone I know.
The husband of a woman I've known for many years.
A prominent figure in the local activist community.

I found out the next morning that he did not survive.
He leaves behind his wife and their four daughters. Three of whom I've watched grow up, and the youngest of whom I remember when she was born.

My daughter and I attended his wake today. There was an outpouring of community support which was nice to see, but it's a bit sad that it takes something like this to bring everyone together.

As it always is, it was a reminder that none of us know how long we have left. That death comes suddenly and surprisingly. That no one is prepared, but everyone somehow goes on.

In an odd way, I feel like I was there when it happened. I wasn't; I was only listening in on the radio, hearing just enough to know someone was in trouble, but not enough to know who, or to suspect how it might affect me personally. I wish I had been, if only to be able to give my friend some understanding of what happened and how. She is struggling to make sense of something that makes little sense.

Today, she was surrounded by love, by friends and community, by an outpouring of grief to hold her close, to hold her up while she mourns. She greeted everyone who came in, with a hug and a smile, and not a few tears. It must have been difficult, even while affirming the man she knows her husband to have been.

His burial is tomorrow.
Most of the people who were there today will fade back into the background.
My friend will somehow go on, having lost her partner, her love, the kind and gentle man she has spent most of her life with.
She will raise their daughters to remember him with love, and to honor his memory by continuing to work for the causes so near to his heart.
How she will do this, I don't know. Just that she will.
My heart goes out to her.

For Ellen, I wish comfort and grace, hope and love, family and faith.
For Peter, I wish the peace he has worked so hard towards.

Obituary

Coordination

It's the beginning of a new semester, which always brings with it new observations on the process of learning.

We have a method for how we teach, but are always learning more about people, about learning, and especially about difficulties learning, so we're constantly refining what we do.

There will never be a "perfect" method that will work with every person in every situation, because people are all different. They key is to remain flexible, and observant, and to approach every difficulty from as many different directions as is necessary.

If I told every student everything I know about fencing in their first week... or month... or even year... they would not be able to understand most of it because they don't yet have the context. This means that sometimes students ask questions that I can't answer, not because I don't know the answer, but because they aren't ready to hear it yet. There is a series of perceptual shifts that have to happen first, and those take time.

I ran up against one of those myself recently, where I was trying to explain my thinking to the master, who was looking at the subject from such a different place that we could not reach a clear understanding on either side, and had to agree to discuss this again later on. Some of that is a language difficulty, trying to put into words feelings and concepts that are non-verbal. But some is that we are in different places still.

I recently had an experience in a class that helped me to understand not what the master was trying to say, but why it was that I couldn't seem to phrase my thoughts or questions in ways that helped us reach an understanding.

We were working on something new in a class of mostly relatively new students. It required coordinating hand and foot in a way they mostly had not had to do before, so it was very challenging. I needed to break the movement down into smaller pieces, so that they could begin to follow the new pattern. It went fairly well and there was great progress between the beginning and end of the class.

At the end of the exercise, as I usually do, I asked if there were any questions.

One of the newest students, a highly intelligent young boy, had several questions.

One of his questions went something like this: "Is this so that you can go faster, and does it lead to special moves?"

???

I had to ask him to clarify his question.

We addressed the "faster" part first, it being the simpler concept.
No, it has nothing to do with going "faster."

I believe he had gotten this impression because we were now coordinating one hand movement with each foot movement, rather than one hand movement for every two foot movements, and to his mind, that meant it was possible to make twice as many blade movements as before, in the same amount of time.

The trouble with that is that blade movements, and therefore hand movements, are not restricted by foot movement at all when you fence. We chose to coordinate the two in this practice session in order to facilitate coordinating movements AT ALL, but in bouting, blade movements are coordinated with your opponent's actions, not with your own feet. After all, it is your opponent who is attacking you, not your feet- unless you have far more serious problems than a fencing bout.

This was clue number one.

Then we addressed the next part of his question. Does this move "lead to special moves"?

Again, I was somewhat mystified by the question.

I asked him what he meant by "special moves."

He said something about how obviously, there are certain special moves that you don't do very often, you sort of keep them in reserve, so that your opponent won't expect them. Maybe a secret move that your opponent doesn't know about, and wouldn't be able to defend against. And he wanted to know if this new thing we had been working on was the beginning of such a move. A "botta secreta." (He didn't use that term, but that's what he meant. Google it if you aren't familiar with it.)

This was clue number two.

I had to think for a minute to figure out how to answer him.
The answer is both simple and complex, depending on where you are in your understanding of not only fencing, but all combat.

I told him that we'd have to discuss it again when he has learned more, but the simple answer is that no, there are no "special moves."


I continued thinking about this long afterwards.

What I realized is that this was a perfect example of the difference in focus between a beginner, and someone who is more knowledgeable and more practiced.

A beginner has a narrow, internal focus. He is still learning to control his own body, his own movements, and has no real understanding of the possibility, let alone the ability, to control another person's actions.

What this often translates to is a beginner's assumption that each action in fencing is decided on, planned, or otherwise thought out by the fencer with no actual connection to what the opponent is doing, other than maybe waiting to see what the opponent does and then trying to somehow counter that action. So, a fencer might plan some secret special attack to use at some previously decided on moment in the bout, in order to gain the advantage and win. He would keep this special attack in reserve until the chosen moment, and not use it any other time. Hence, the "specialness" of it.

This same internal focus lends itself to the belief that all coordination is of your own movements- your hand with your feet, your blade actions with your movements forwards and back.

There is no understanding that whatever actions you take are inextricably linked to your opponent, two ends of the same thread, tied together like a figure-eight follow through knot.

There is no understanding that your opponent's actions are controlled by your actions, your cues, your communication and misdirection. That you almost literally tell him what to do, so that you are prepared for it and can easily take advantage. That you do not "beat" your opponent so much as you set the stage for him to be his own undoing.

Beginners are very yang in how they look at combat.
Action, strength, speed, force, trickery.
They don't yet see the possibility of diversion, deflection, reflection, invitation, illusion.

I could go on.
There is also the mind/body separation of beginners (and I'm using that term in a very broad sense... one can be a "beginner" for a very long time!), in this culture of intense priority given to academic, intellectual thinking, and the resultant devaluing of all things physical. People who are still stuck in an intellectual appraisal mode want things to add up, match up, and "make sense" in ways that are easily counted and/or verbalized. It ain't necessarily so.

But my point in relating this story is to show how it was that I had this realization, with this student's series of questions, of how it feels to have someone ask a question from such a different frame of reference as to almost be speaking an entirely different language.

He would not have been able to understand much outside himself at that moment. He has not yet progressed to a place where he can SEE outside himself in this. It would have been much like trying to explain the ocean to a desert dweller, colors to a blind man, or algebra to my dog.

But what was most interesting to me was that his question, which made perfect sense to him, from his perspective, made so little sense to me at first, from my perspective, that I had to stop, go back, figure out his perspective, and then re-examine the question to even know what he was asking.

I suspect something quite similar happened in my recent discussion with the master, the one where we never came to an understanding.
Maybe he DID understand what I was trying to say, but is at such a different conceptual place that he couldn't answer anything in a way that I would have been able to get to at all- and trying to answer it from my perspective, which he no longer holds, was meaningless and just plain silly.

It probably didn't help that I'm somewhat in between perspectives on that particular thing, and part of my questioning was to try to make that leap from one to the other. Didn't get there. Yet. But it feels close. I can't explain it in words... and still seem to need to rely on them to try to explain. My guess is that it won't need explaining when I get it. We'll both know.

I'm close.
Very close.
I can't explain it... but I can feel it.

Seeds

Life is made up of a long series of moments, each connecting to the ones before and after it.

I've long believed that one must appreciate all that came before, if you are in a place you want to be. Even the mistakes, the heartache and the pain, were part of bringing you to where you are now. Especially those.

It is not always possible to recognize change when it happens. Sometimes, it sneaks in slowly, imperceptibly, and you don't notice until things have been developing for a while. But sometimes, change happens within the space of a heartbeat, a breath, and you know, in that moment, that nothing will ever be the same.

Most of the time, it is far easier to look back and see the change in retrospect. Still, it is only rarely that you can trace something back to a specific moment.

I have a few of those moments in my life.

Some are sort of "standard." My first kiss. The birth of my first child. That sort of thing.

But others are less obvious to anyone other than myself.


I was eight or nine years old. We lived in an old victorian house (which I loved and would love to be able to buy, but it won't happen) on the main street of town, a little up the hill from the actual downtown area. I remember it was the middle of the night, dark and very windy, when I was woken up. I don't know what woke me, whether it was the lights, or the sounds, or a member of my family, but a house on the block behind ours was on fire. It was a new house, and I'm not sure whether anyone even lived in it yet.

Between that house and ours was another house, one facing the small cross street, which had been split up into several apartments. I knew almost everyone in that house, and watched from my bedroom window as they were evacuated.

I was terrified of fire. Transfixed at the window, unable to speak or move, I watched the drama unfold throughout the night. Were they going to evacuate us, too? Where would we go? Was the huge tree next to the burning house going to catch on fire and then spread embers throughout the neighborhood?

I remember almost nothing outside myself that night. Where were my parents? My sisters? How long did I stay at that window? I have no idea. I just remember the flames, the smoke, the flashing lights, the howling wind, the firefighters evacuating the house behind us.

And one other thing.

The tree did not burst into flames.
The fire did not spread.
It did not reach out across that space, hungry for victims, to find me.

I have never been afraid of fire since.
Respectful, absolutely.
But not afraid.

The third time's a charm

Seems like it usually happens- the coldest day of the year, and a structure fire.

The day started out as planned. My daughter had a chiropractor's appointment. Midway through her adjustment, the tones hit.

I can tell almost immediately what kind of call it's going to be. If the first thing I hear after the alert is the ambulance tones, it's an EMS call. If it's the siren tones, it's probably an MVA. But this time, it was the siren tone, followed by another tone...

This is not a good sound.
A structure fire, reported by the neighbors across the street. This means it has likely been going for a while.
And crap, I'm out of position. A good 12-15 minutes away.

I pay at the desk, and go to the car to gear up. My daughter races to the car as soon as her appointment is done, just in time for me to hop in and drive. She's a good sport, and hops out of the car at the intersection closest to our house, so I don't have to detour to drop her off.

I can see the mutual aid engine coming up the road, and turn ahead of them. About half a mile ahead of me, I see our engine heading away from the station. I know that I'll end up passing it- contrary to popular belief, fire engines don't go that fast; they're too heavy. At least ours is- it doubles as a tanker, with around 2000 gallons of water.

As it heads up the hill towards the structure, I'm able to pass, and get to the scene ahead of it. I pull up past the fire, to leave room for more apparatus, hop out of my car, grab my camera, and start shooting as I walk back to the scene. The next 6 hours are alternated between working on water supply, as interim safety officer, accountability, running messages for the IC, moving hoses, trying to keep things (including firefighters) from freezing up, and taking pictures, some for the investigation.

It was a balmy zero degrees or so.




This is what I saw walking back to the scene. Flames shooting out of the front of the structure; heavy smoke.

As I got closer, I could see the attack team out front.


Another shot of the attack. And that's my kid on the left. He was home, so got there before I did. He's backing up one of our newest members, who is at his first structure fire.


Now my pal sj has arrived on scene, and is backing up the attack. In front of them, to the left of the house, is what remains of the trailer where the fire started. Right. I know. You can't see the trailer. There's not much left.



Now a shot of the team in the back of the house, trying to get water up into the attic floor. More about that later.
Check out the names of the guys from the nearby career company assisting us. Cook and Baker. Kind of funny, if you look at it right.
I went to high school with Baker. Small world.

So here's the deal.
The fire is up in the space between the ceiling of the lower floor, and the floor of the attic. Stubbornly hiding from us. Fire is like that. We had to get an excavator from the town highway department to come and remove most of the roof, to dig into that attic floor and expose the fire.

It worked.
As soon as the attic floor was opened up, heavy fire.
One of the mutual aid companies has a ladder truck, and we doused the top of the house from the top of the aerial.

Were given the word from the chief to pack up after about six hours in the bitter cold. Most of the hoses and some of the pump valves had long since frozen up.

I learned why so many volunteer firefighters drive pickup trucks.
To haul the frozen hoses back after calls like this. There's no way to pack them back on the apparatus.

Everyone heads back to the station, for hot chocolate and a lot of laying out hoses to thaw. Put the apparatus back in service as best we could, hindered by a lack of usable hoses- and our fuel tanks had both frozen up. Oh- and the dry hydrant at the town pond was also frozen, so they had to head down into the nearby town that has hydrants to refill the water tanks. Our tiny town doesn't have a hydrant system, and uses tanker shuttles and a portable pond for water supply.

Headed for home, tired and cold.
Tried to catch up with the stuff I had intended to do all day.
Hit the sack, ready for a nice long sleep, at about 1am.

At 2:37, the tones went off again.
A rekindle.
This sounds like somehow, a new fire has started, but the truth is that the first fire apparently was never really out.
Should have had that excavator take the entire roof off. I, being a lowly relatively new company member, with no seniority or status of any kind, was not privy to the decision about what to have the excavator do or not do. So I don't know why or how things were decided. I don't know how the decision is made to call the fire "out" and return everyone to service, either.
Sometimes, mistakes are made.

This was one of those times.

It being o'dark thirty, and knowing the rekindle had to be reported by a neighbor, told me that it was probably going pretty good. Had to have been for anyone to notice at that time of night.

We headed out the door for the station, and our hopefully somewhat dryer gear. Not in such a hurry this time- nothing left to save, really, and no one in the house, so no life safety issues.

Arrived on scene to this:

Pretty- if it's not your house.
The fire had now dropped down from the ceiling into the lower part of the house, and was really cooking by the time we got there. Enough so that we barely noticed the now -6 degrees.

For a while, anyway.

Another view, moments later, as the fire continues to grow.

We were there ahead of any water supply, so I took some pictures while waiting for the apparatus to get there.
Spent the next couple of hours working on water supply, so no more picture taking.

Instead, I got to play in the water.
I was in charge of the valve for filling the tank from the supply tanker. No pond in the night- ours wasn't repacked, and besides, the apparatus it travels on was out of service. So we filled directly from another tanker.

Trouble is that in the cold, nothing was connecting right, and everything was icy and slippery. When the tank was full, water would spray between where I was, and the valve I needed to close, so I had to reach through a substantial shower to get it closed, getting soaked in the process. I was an icicle. Crunchy. Crackly. Kind of impressive. It's too bad I'm the one with the camera. Not.

You have to imagine it- I was covered in ice, the truck was covered in ice, the ground was covered in ice, the hose was covered in ice, the valve was covered in ice. Even the ice was covered in ice. My gloves were frozen into the claws of the zombie creature from the deep, and anything I touched, I immediately froze to. It was amusing, in a middle-of-the-nightmare sort of way.

After a couple of hours alternating between waiting, and getting soaked, we were released to go home. Still a fair amount of steam coming off the top of that house. I wasn't convinced the fire was really, really out. But it's not my call.

When I got to my car, I couldn't get in- nothing would bend. I had to break some of the ice first. And then, when I got back to the station, I couldn't get my turnout coat off- the latches were iced over. I had to pour warm water on them to free them up.

Got home around 5:30-ish. Too late to go to bed, or not?
Ended up trying to catch a nap, at least, but couldn't get warm enough to actually sleep.

We got up on the early side, planning to head down to a pancake breakfast sponsored by another nearby fire company. I decided that we should drive past that house again, just to see if it had "rekindled again," rather than get to breakfast and end up toned out, and being 20 minutes away.

As we got near the house, we could see smoke in the air. Great.
It was mostly white... could be steam... but in the middle there... looks a little darker.

I parked the car, and walked around the back of the house to get a look up into what was left of that ceiling. Before I got around the back, I could hear the fire crackling.

Sure enough, there it was, flames a couple of feet high, right in that spot in the ceiling that had given us the most trouble before.

Went back to the car. "I got your good news, and your bad news... We won't be having pancakes. But it's small, and we may be able to handle it with the mini-pumper."

I pulled out my cell phone. I don't have a portable radio. Called one of the assistant chiefs, whose number I have. No answer. Tried another one. No answer. Tried the chief chief. No answer.

Meanwhile, we're headed back to the station, about a mile away. If we act fast, and get our mini-pumper up here, we can probably get that out before it gets going, and maybe most of the company can sleep in.

It was not to be.

As we were headed back up the hill, having gotten hold of a couple of the assistant chiefs (I was talking on the phone while gearing up), who suggested an "investigation" rather than toning the whole company, one of the assistant chiefs from our sister company radioed in that he was on scene, and reported the rekindle, and had dispatch wake everyone up.

We arrived on scene a minute later, and had the fire knocked down as soon as we got the preconnect pulled.

But it was still smoldering up there in that ceiling- we just couldn't tell where, exactly, it was coming from, and whether it was actually a "hot spot" or just evaporating water. It had risen to a high of -2 degrees, so anything even remotely warm was giving off "steam."

We got some more manpower on scene, and some guys went inside (no more ceiling over most of it to worry about collapsing) to pull what they could, and get water up inside there.


Should have taken down the entire roof, I tell you. Would probably have gotten a good night's sleep.

Went back to the station after a couple of hours.

Too late for pancakes.

I had to cancel a couple of lessons, but had classes to teach in the afternoon. So off I went to teach them, having spent about 11 of the past 24 hours in the subzero cold, some of that soaking wet besides, and about an hour and a half sleeping.

A little punchy, maybe, but I made it through.
Both classes went very well.

On the way home, I drove past the scene again, just so I'd know.

Not a wisp of anything.

The third time's a charm, I guess.
Cross your fingers for me, okay?


The good news: the people were not home at the time of the fire, and their dog and cats made it out safely. As long as that happens, and no one is injured, I'm good with it.

I swear it's true

I thought this was unbelievable, so I checked it out on snopes.com, and it's true!

Internet spam has become such a huge problem that Homeland Security has declared spammers to be terrorists. They are monitoring e-mail volume, and anyone who sends more than 100 e-mails a day will be put on the "terrorist" list. You will have your internet service canceled, and be unable to board an airplane in the US.

The Society for Prevention of Internet Fraud (SPIF) has a petition up at www.SPIF.org- make sure to go sign it to protest this designation. You have the right to send as many e-mails a day as you want, as long as they're not spam!

Make sure to send this to everyone you know so they will know what's going on.


-------


Here's what I want to know: why on earth do people fall for crap like this?? Why is it that people who appear to be otherwise intelligent and reasonable go into instant panic mode when they get some forwarded e-mail "warning"??


If you typed up a note and put it on the windshield of their car, most people would ignore it. Send it snail mail, and they won't even open it. But e-mail it to them, especially if it is clearly an e-mail that has been forwarded multiple times, and they'll swallow it hook, line and sinker.

And if you dare to point out to them that this is yet another forwarded urban legend, or something designed to incite panic, they will argue with you.

Spammers and scammers have gotten clever, it's true. Just like some guy who knows just what to say, how to look into her eyes, to get any woman to fall for him, scammers know how to get people to believe what they say. They'll tell you they've already "checked it on snopes.com." They'll make it look like it came from a personal friend. They'll drop names. Tell sob stories. Use URLs that are similar to well known companies. Some even go as far as creating look-alike websites.

One e-mail I got recently was made to look like it had images that didn't load, with a helpful link for "if you have any trouble reading this e-mail." I guess people have gotten wise enough, at least, not to click on things so readily.

This willingness to believe anything extends beyond spam, to almost any website. Make it look like "news" and people believe it is. And look at Wikipedia. A fabulous resource- as long as you stay aware of the limitations, that what is posted there may or may not be 100% accurate.


It is often the newbies who fall prey to such things... but not always. The people who produce this stuff are very good at what they do. Advertising and propaganda, not to mention just plain cons, are a science and an art.

I'd like to offer these suggestions that people should be required to read before being allowed to post anything online anywhere:

1. If it tells you to forward it, don't. Just don't. I don't care how funny you think it is, or how worried you are about some impending doom.
2. If it claims to have already been "checked out on snopes.com," it's a scam.
3. Those pills don't make your penis larger.
4. If they did, no one but you would care.
5. No one legitimate will ever e-mail and ask for your password.
6. Likewise, they will not use e-mail to tell you your account has been canceled... click here now to reinstate it.
7. The more dire the warning, the less likely it is true.
8. If you send forwarded e-mails to any list I run, especially with multiple layers of quotes, and/or don't trim what is quoted in your messages, you will be fed to velociraptors.
9. Don't believe everything you read. Even online. Especially online. Even if it claims all sorts of legitimacy. And even if it looks "real."



Oh... one last thing... just to be safe...
that warning I started with, about spammers being terrorists? I made that up.
Please don't turn it into the latest e-mail warning.

The point

Le point c'est tout.

The point is everything.

Fencing often presents the student with conundrums, and with paradoxes.

Things are not always what they seem.
This is true because what they SEEM is always colored by the perceptions, the conceptions, and the limitations of the person who is doing the seeing.

If one hopes to see the truth, one must remove the "self" from the equation. Remove the biases, the misperceptions, the slants, remove the emotions that cloud vision or that focus everything in an unbalanced way.


I've known this for a while now.
Learning to control emotions, not to allow them to get in the way of perception, is one of the most valuable things about the sword, most easily harnessed in everyday life to great benefit.

But it wasn't until yesterday that I truly grasped the other part of this, the physical part.

In order to see truth, and to act in truth, one must remove the PHYSICAL self, as well.

But this is clearly not possible. The physical self is, well... physical, right? Solid. How can you BE, if you have no physical self?

A lovely paradox.

I have long enjoyed that in fencing, there are a large number of pairs of things that must be balanced. I have often told students that one of the most challenging things is not so much what you must do, what must move, but what you must NOT do, what must NOT move.

Action/inaction
tension/relaxation
hard/soft
forceful/yielding
Or, if you wish, yang/yin.

These are what fencing really is, the balance between these things, in each moment, in each muscle, each thought, each movement, each intent.

But how do you know which to do, to be, at any given moment? And how do you move between them?

The simplest answer is that you do so by feel.

But how do you know WHAT you should feel?

This is what came up in my lesson yesterday, that the concept, the understanding, can only come AFTER the physical ability exists. You must be able to do something, to feel something, before you can understand it. You train the mind by training the body FIRST, not the other way around. This is counter to almost all education- because almost all education is cognitive based, not psycho-motor based.


But let's back up a bit, to how I got there, and why it was yesterday that I reached a point I had not felt before.


There have been changes in my understanding of fencing, for all the years that I've been doing this. Some things come quickly, others not so much, and still others change as I change.

Recently, I've been considering the difference between the point PULLING the rest of the body into a lunge, and the feeling of PUSHING the point with the thrust, much like a punch. The interesting part is that almost everyone, almost all the time, equates intent with force, equates intense focus with tension, and these things are not necessarily connected in the way that most people connect them.

In fact, with the sword, it is important that these connections are NOT assumed.
It is not about forcing things to happen, it is about allowing them to happen.

Again, I've known this for a long time. But as words, as thoughts. As mental constructs.

Yesterday, I realized, incorporated, something important.

It is that while fencing, I exist only in two "places."
The point.
And my center.

The point pulls me to action.
My center provides the energy for that action.

The less anything else is consciously involved, the better.

In other words:
I do not move the sword with my hand, but with my center.
EVERYTHING I do originates there.

It is not I, not my body, nor the sword, that moves towards the target, it is the point.

The point is everything, moved by the energy of my center.

And when that happens, when it really is that way, in perfect focus, perfect relaxation, in the moment, the point pulls me into the lunge, of its own accord.

I do not lunge.
The lunge, lunges me.

It is as if time and space open, and create the possibility, and therefore, the inevitability, of the lunge, and the lunge creates itself to fill that opening.

Like lightning. The path for the lightning comes into existence, and the lightning fills it.

Between my center and the point... is the space in which I simultaneously do and do not exist.

That is how the physical self is removed from the action.

It is difficult to put this all into words that anyone else might understand at all.

That's okay.
I need to understand it, and I do. At least a little, and at least from the perspective I have right now.

All I ask of anyone reading this is to understand that there is more to fencing than meets the eye, literally and figuratively. And that it is this, the tangible intangible, that I find so compelling.

Evaluation time

It's the end of the college semester. That means evaluation time.

We always read the evaluation forms. Most of the comments are fairly similar, but sometimes, there are a few that stand out. I thought I'd share a few.

We see a wide range, from the ones who find something they didn't even know they were looking for, to the few who really don't get it at all. From those who appreciate the structure and discipline, to those who really just wanted to grab a sword and have at it.

Sometimes, the interesting part is the pairs of comments we get from the same class.

Like these:

Student #1: "I would not recommend it because it isn't much exercise."
Student #2: "I expected to have sore legs and arms and my butt too. Oh yeah, they were definitely met."

Student #1: "No, fencing is not as physical as I thought it would be. You don't even get a sweat."
Student #2: "I would recommend it based on the physical demands (good exercise)."

So what is up with that? Remember, these are two students from the exact same class, same semester.

You might assume that the first student is in better shape than the second student, that what is easy for one, is difficult for the other.
You would be wrong.

We can easily predict which students, if any, will make a comment about the class not being physically demanding enough, not being a good workout.

It's simple.
It's the ones who don't DO the workout. The ones who show up late, phone it in, and/or stumble through the moves without any actual effort or attention. The students who, at the end of the semester, look about the same as they did on the first day.

Contrast that with those who are putting in physical and mental effort, who are trying to gain some level of skill, who pay attention to details as best they can, and really try to get it right. They never complain about it not being difficult enough.

Likewise, we often have pairs where one person says there is too much discussion, and another says that's the best part. Pairs where one says the class moved too slowly, and another who says it should slow down. I don't believe we have ever had a class where we got only one comment from the usual pairs.

Some of the more fun comments, mostly from the newly converted, highly enthusiastic students:

"Yes, it is amazing, take it now."
"You would be a crazy fool not to take this course!"
"It is a class out of the ordinary."
"I learned so much and built strength both in a new physical field and mentally."
"Where else could you unleash your desire to be a chivalrous knight without seeming immature?"
"Not something you're likely to find anywhere else."
"Yes, because the instructor is insane, but it's a good insane."
"Make it once a day, not once a week, dammit! It hurts to wait for this class!"

My all-time favorite comment: "Workout with happiness!"

And some of the puzzling comments:

"I would suggest introducing the actual olympic game of fencing and allowing students to duel one another."

Wow. What class did they think they were in?!?
1. This isn't olympic fencing. Period.
2. Allowing students to get killed would be frowned on, I believe.

"It focuses more on technique than I expected."

Hmm. So what DID you expect it to focus on?

"I would recommend it, but only if they really wanted to learn to fence."

And you needed to point this out why, exactly?

In the recommendations for improvement section:
"A little less fencing instruction."

And what should we do instead? Go bowling?

"Be less concerned about safety."

?!!



From the rapier class:
"Lighter swords."

Uh... sorry. If you want to work with lighter swords, don't take the class with the heavy ones. It's that simple. If you want to learn to use a rapier, you pretty much have to use... a rapier. Who knew?


These are a few of the comments from the past couple of years. Stay tuned next semester. I'm sure there will be more.