Letting Go

Blood surging, choking thought, restless confusion, mental annihilation, breaking down, incessant pulsing thought, and release. Somewhere I have gone off course and set adrift to madness. I stop trying to be right because I am wrong. Just as education merely reveals the extent of one’s ignorance, finally letting go makes one aware of how hard one was holding on.

Overcoming the opponent's strength is only as important as overcoming their weakest point. But unlocking myself to overcome my weakest point has proven insurmountable time again. The more I resist, the more insurmountable the weakness becomes juxtaposed to my opponent’s strength. It is a desperate struggle to find my place, my substance, individuality, within the subjugation - the all but certain submission.

A clearer expression of power I cannot find.

Looking inward, I discover a moment of calm reflection on my situation, apart from the noise of the crowd, the brutality of the collective. In these thoughts I intellectualize - a philosophical struggle - analyze and process in a cognitive battle that is as exhausting as the physical battle I wage on the mat. The clarity with which I can process the movements I make, those my opponent makes, and the way in which my every defense and counter aggression is humbly rejected and sent back to me for re-evaluation is utterly bewildering.

I feel my body designed for defeat. Am I truly grappling with another or is this opposing force a projection of my own worst fears, my subconscious mind awakening in physical form, wrestling me to submission that I may better understand my own limited dimensions?

Only in testing myself and pushing myself beyond can I know how far I can go. Or to paraphrase literary greatness, the only ones who truly know the edge are the ones who have gone over. Everything else is subjective and speculative.

I cannot know death until I have died and I cannot know true powerlessness until I have been submitted. To be in the asphyxiating breach of constricting choke or the calculated angles of joint locks tearing at muscle fibers, straining ligaments, compressing bone, is to die hundreds of small deaths and again and again be brought back to life.

Here, my life is not in danger; only my assumptions and my ego. Life and death thrust into a decisive lottery would preclude such an intellectual evaluation of roles and consequences and instead necessitate a pure neuro-chemically induced reaction. The chess game will have ceased to have relevance; there will only remain an existential gamble towards deliverance and a visceral hope that life may prevail.

This moment has not come and, for now, I roll with the weight and hold to the intention of overcoming, if through no other means than my obstinate, elusive defense. In the moment, my truest devotion to self lies only in not being so easily taken, submersed, drowned. Within the parameters of the grapple, I remain obsequious to the framework I am to engage my opponent and allow myself to confront what would, in another context, be the worst case scenario. That scenario - a nearly certain acquiescence to the strange ecstasy of unconsciousness - a final brush against the edge - peering over to my own peril but not yet willing to know what awaits below.

What would I do when the most obvious and instinctual defenses are rendered feeble and ineffective? When I have crossed that ugly premonition and can only summon every resource to break that grip and prevent that hand from running the oh so final course across my neck, do I succeed, overcome?

These questions annihilate my conscious and assault my rational mind.

On the mat I am failing, or clinging to life - held together only by the human mercy of my opponent because he only wants me to touch the edge, not go over; to recognize my error and correct; to absorb the resilience and find my way out of the tunnel; to learn that the most assured path to survival is, for an instant, experiencing what it means to look at death and fight it off.

I survived today and am better for it.