The Opponent is Yourself

Life is a collection of activities.

We like to think of our ‘life’ as something apart from our quotidian routines - commuting, trips to the store, cleaning the house, etc. These trivialities, we imagine, are distinct from the ‘living’ we do while on holiday, long weekends, and in our free time more generally.

This, however, is wrong.

As Bukowski said, “the dread of life is that swarm of trivialities", and within the capricious performance that is our life, you are almost always your most difficult and worthy adversary. 

One such activity in this life is grappling.

The exchange of physical force without the use of blows to submit an opponent. Much can and has been spoken of grappling, jiujitsu, and the intersection of philosophy, and much of it is true. There is something raw, untethering, and cathartic in engaging another human in a physical altercation in which you attempt to pin, choke, and/or joint lock one another - in a sporting context, of course.

For men particularly, there is an element of profound humility in this endeavor since most of us walk through the world with a deeply misguided understanding of our own physical intuition and capabilities.

Grappling abruptly and unambiguously clarifies this misconception. Some authors liken learning to grapple to learning to swim - in essence, being taken into the open ocean and compelled to make it back to shore.

There is an innate physical response to struggle against your opponent, but you end up depleted and inevitably drown in the overpowering water. Your defenses are tested and overcome; your imagined offenses are easily countered and neutralized; and your psychological resolve is slowly, methodically, dismantled until only the fragile outline of your former self remains. You experience this over and over and over until you slowly begin to grow stronger, more relaxed, more strategic, more resilient.

The water washes over you but does not suffocate you. It pummels your body but you move with it's contours and its blows rebound away and can not incapacitate you.

You stop relying on your arms and shoulders and instead lie on your back and engage your legs and hips. 

Suddenly, you are above the water and working with it. It still comes to you in opposition, but you are now swimming. 

The metaphor of water is a bit worn out, but it works well to illustrate the concepts of grappling, and living more generally. Brute force and struggle are rarely effective in achieving victory. Nuance, good technique, timing, distance, and strategic intelligence are much more impactful.

You receive and leverage opposing force instead of resisting it with your own force. You use momentum and balance to your advantage instead of exhausting yourself fighting for a better position.

You wait patiently and move; you explode powerfully and with intention. 

There is dichotomy in motion, complexity in the exchange, and you are both a relentless predator - ruthless and adaptive, and a calculating, defensive prey capable of catastrophically draining your opponent’s energy and surprising with clever counterattacks. 

The duality in grappling is where the ‘opponent as self’ concept truly shines.

You are both the pursuer and the pursued; the oppressor and oppressed.

The magic of being able to assume either role is a question of training and skill, and the truly proficient are advantaged in both, but the real opposition is always just you. 

Like your other life characters - your other ‘selves’ - perspective and preparation govern your experience. As you begin to know yourself better and see yourself in the context of the systems around you, you expose the adversary a little more.

You gain a bit more advantage. 

Your self as antagonist never really recedes, but with each small triumph you reclaim more space from your opponent. As we know from grappling, space is the primary resource in dispute and is a good metric for our capacity to survive.

Manage your space, defend your space, and overcome your own mind.