If this post had moralistic intentions, it would have the advantage of being very short.

A few impactful sentences, spiced with some platitudes, and that’s it. We train in a martial discipline not to learn how to slap a hypothetical aggressor but to face the many daily challenges. Because the real fight is making ends meet every month, not decapitating a colleague, being patient with a child, and so on. Bla bla bla.

All true things, of course!

But one of the features of this blog is to use up a little more electronic ink, with the ambition of not saying (too many) obvious things. We all know those already. They’re not helpful.

So the question is: what is our relationship with fighting?

If we’re talking about competition and tournaments, despite a few attempts, an Aikido practitioner doesn’t fight on the tatami. It’s not part of the practice.

In other disciplines where competition is expected, we struggle a bit to equate fighting sports’ kumite with combat. With that kind of all-encompassing clash that nature constantly presents us with. For territorial dominance. For predation. To ensure the survival of the species.

We’ve been lucky to work with Olympic-level athletes in combat sports. Extreme training and performances, with bandages, plasters, and bruises everywhere, but always well within the boundary where, as in nature, it’s a matter of life and death.

And outside the tatami?

So far, even living in the most degraded neighborhoods of our towns, we’re not in a situation where we say goodbye to our loved ones in the morning, unsure if we’ll ever see them again in the evening. Becoming numb to the various wars, some just a few hundred kilometers away, could quickly bring that kind of uncertainty back here as well.

But for now, we leave our home and we don’t fight.

What we do instead is crossing countless dimensions of conflict.

From the outside, economic pressures rain down on us. Indeed, being able to make a living is quite like a “life or death” situation. But none of us shows up to work in a gi and starts throwing coleagues and suppliers (even if we’d like to sometimes).

And then there are so many relational dysfunctions, manifesting as tensions, misunderstandings, asymmetries.

Internally, conflicts crystallize into fears. Worries about sudden illnesses, an emotion stifled and unacknowledged for too long…

So many conflicts. Yet no combat.

And we spend our lives training to master technique better and better. Some to pin down an opponent, some to strike, some to throw, some to disarm… Yet then, when do we actually fight?

Few of us are security or defense professionals. Very few are members of elite forces. And even those who have experienced “life or death” combat fortunately have professions where combat is not a majority constant.

So, what’s the takeaway?

This bubble of peace that seems to be dissolving, which for the part of the world we live in has ensured the absence of war for eighty years, has fortunately removed combat from the horizon of common experiences. Yet it has left a void that perhaps we haven’t been able, as individuals and as nations, to fill properly.

Aggression and resentment are weeds that have infested the public and private dimensions of social life. All well-watered by loneliness, disparities, and a progressive individualism that, instead of placing the person at the center, has ended up suffocating them.

And where combat, once imposed, forced everyone to stay “on” the tatami of life, paying close attention to what to say and do, its absence has not always fostered mature peace but a flourishing of conflicts on a smaller scale and a thousand forms of psychosis.

It’s as if something within us, despite knowing there’s everything to lose, still wants to move toward combat. Attracted like a moth to a flame, we don’t know how to build peace with concrete actions and regret it once it’s burned away.

Sublimate all this on a ring or a tatami? It might help, but it doesn’t fully answer the question: is there something worth fighting for? Or do we prefer to fill our heads with prepackaged answers, even codified in the form of Martial Arts, just to avoid admitting that sometimes we lose sight of the fact that there are things and people worth living for, and why not, even dying for.

Budo, in its avoidance of combat, in its dissection of conflict, sets this goal. Technique by technique, it aims to establish a solid foundation for asking this question. Without providing the answer. That is left to those who have the courage to face it.

Disclaime: picture by di Ivan Samkov from Pexels