learning to fall
As most of you reading this already know, I take jujitsu classes in the evenings three times a week. Tonight’s class was frustrating to me, as I came into class with a muscle that couldn’t decide if it was pulled or not, and 45 minutes into class I jammed my thumb when it got stuck under the guy I was throwing. although sensei wrapped it immediately, I was unable to continue. So I sat at the side of class and watched, and while I learned, it wasn’t what I wanted to do. It just seemed like the perfect ending to a perfectly crappy day.
I won’t give the events of the day any more energy than I already have by describing them in detail; suffice it to say it was a bad day at work, and I regret not listening to my inner voice which told me to leave early at 3 and just go home. I am fortunate enough to work for a supervisor who would have let me do it, no questions asked, and for that I am grateful. So after I got home tonight, I was thinking about what to call this entry. I had settled on something like Life’s Pop Quiz when the idea for the title came to me in an unexpected fashion.
I was in the process of changing out of my work clothes, wondering why it’s so easy for me to do rolls and falls in class and why it’s so different and hard to ‘take a fall’ away from the mat, in my life. In a sudden flash of insight, I realized it’s not different at all - it only seems that way because the setting and circumstances are different. A jujitsu fall is simply a way of handling an off balance situation without getting hurt. But in order to do it, I must be off balance first and go in the direction of the off balancing. Today became the way it did because after I got off balance, and instead of flowing with it to negate its effects, I resisted, so the fall was much harder than it needed to be.
To practice jujitsu is to face the fear of falling. You have to. Perhaps someday I will learn how to let that lack of fear on the mat translate to a lack of fear in my life. On the mat, when I fall, I get back up again. I don’t berate myself for doing something that put me there in the first place, I don’t attach a negative value to the experience. It is simply something that must be done so I can practice safely. Time to take that off the mat and into the world. tomorrow is another day, a chance to get back up and recover from today’s fall.