Another marathon, another black belt another gruelling physically stretching pain inducing endeavour where we venture out bravely to our furthest limits but we do not venture in. The elements conquered. A pat on the back, a medal, a trophy, admiration from our piers, awards stacking up on our shelves like greedy boards. Geoff Thompson explores...

Another marathon, another black belt another gruelling physically stretching pain inducing endeavour where we venture out bravely to our furthest limits but we do not venture in. The elements conquered. A pat on the back, a medal, a trophy, admiration from our piers, awards stacking up on our shelves like greedy boards. How brave, how exciting, how very fucking invigorating, a little rest then onto the next extreme challenge, searching for the next un-chartered landscape that we can not only attack but also tell our friends that we are going to attack so that they can flatter us and say with layers of admiration ‘isn’t he mad, isn’t he crazy, isn’t he out of his box, isn’t he out of his mind.’ The praise comes at us like a sickly sweet chocolate waterfall and we let it shower over us.

It’s good to be brave.

But how brave are we?

Do we choose the fights that we know we can win (even though we tell ourselves how extremely dangerous they are)? And are we guilty of racing out there pretending to look for the un-chartered when actually we really know that all of it is chartered and - although certainly physically demanding – all of it has been done before.

I don’t know much I have to say, but what I do know and what I have learned is this; in order to be really brave, to be really extreme, to be really daring and adventurous and to really (I mean really) look death in the eye and take our hearts (and our arses) in our hand we need never do another climb, race another marathon, face another black belt panel, fight another monster on the night club door, in fact I’d say that if we really want to stop pretending we don’t need to leave the city that we live in, the town, the road, the street, the house, the room or even our own skin.

If we want to be really brave we just need to close our eyes, stop going out and start going in. Fuck Nanga Parbat, fuck the hundred man kumite, fuck the marathon across the desert or the triathlon across broken glass in bare feet, fuck all of that because it is old hat, it has all been done, that old parrot of a challenge is dead, it is all boringly predictable compared to the real challenge of going inside and taking a cold hard honesty look at yourself – and then changing the bits that no longer serve. Actually, even before that, admitting the fact that the man/woman that you look at in the bathroom mirror every day is deeply flawed and in need of a good catharsis, the man with ten black belt certificates in his draw in ten different styles from ten different masters, the man that the outside world thinks is granite tough is not even tough enough to leave the job he hates, the wife that treats him badly, the city that no longer nourishes him or the habits that are bleeding him dry because he is frightened shitless of change because change is so full of uncertainty. The man that impressed the living shit out of everyone by climbing ten peaks in ten months losing ten toes to frost bite is not even strong enough to resist temptation, instead he loses his integrity when he buries his manhood into his best mates wife. For a five second spurty tingle of cloudy liquid he loses his soul. Most of us think we are tough, and we kid ourselves that we are to the enth degree, but we are not even tough enough to deal with the greed and envy in our gut, the panic and fear in our chest, the repressed rage that is hooked and fish-boned into the flesh of our throats or the jealousy that rages in our heads.

We feel tough but we can’t control what we eat and what we drink and what we ingest, we feel strong yet we let our thoughts kick sand in our faces, we feel manly and yet we fear to cry, we claim power and yet we lack even the power to change. So we go out, we do courses, we listen to lectures, we take yoga (five different styles), we start weights, or step or qui gung or tai chi, we read the bible, we devour the I-ching or memorise line and verse from the Bagavad Gita, when we feel spiritual we quote Loa Tzu and when we feel angry we fire invectives from Sun Tzu, we talk about the Upanishads (‘what, you haven’t read the Upanishads?’) we meditate, contemplate, whirl like a dervish, chant, have homeopathy, get our feet massaged, have our scalps fingered by a dark skinned chop fryer from Bolton, do the tarot, have our runes read, visit spiritual healers, sun worship go on a fucking retreat and talk to fucking trees, we go out and we do it all; and that’s the point, we are going out but we’re not going in, because out there is the path that is so well travelled that the ground is flat. There is only one path that is not only less travelled but not fucking travelled at all and that is that one true path that leads us into the murky quarry, the slushy cerebral dumping ground where the decomposing (but still very alive) bodies of our pasts lie waiting not only for their reckoning, not only for their release date, not only for their say, but for their redemption.
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It is hard to look at what you did, what was done to you, how you were treated and how you treated others, it is hard to look the many versions of the old you in the eye and say ‘actually I don’t like you, I don’t like what you are, what you did, I don’t like what you didn’t do, I don’t like what you became, I don’t like what you allowed yourself to become, I don’t understand you.’ That’s hard. That’s a mountain to climb, that is a fearsome hundred man kumite (each opponent a version of the old you with a grudge to bear and a bloody axe to grind) but it gets even harder, because to ensure the release of these trapped entities you don’t just have to acknowledge them and look them in the eye you have to face them and say, ‘I forgive you, I forgive them, I let me (all of me) go, I let them go.’

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