James Rhodes has encapsulated in the most eloquent and accurate way EXACTLY how I feel about the martial arts in general and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu specifically in his amazing article, “Find what you love and let it kill you!” His passion is the piano, but if you simply replace the descriptive words about music and back fill with “BJJ” or “martial arts” and he has nailed exactly how I feel about my first true love; the combative arts.
Trying to explain my incessant obsession with anyone who does not share the same passion is often futile. But recent events in my life have forced me to re-evaluate and re-prioritize my goals. BJJ is top of the list.
Anyways… check out this snippet and then click the link to read the entire article (thanks to Spider for turning me onto this!)
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“After the inevitable “How many hours a day do you practice?” and “Show me your hands”, the most common thing people say to me when they hear I’m a pianist is “I used to play the piano as a kid. I really regret giving it up”. I imagine authors have lost count of the number of people who have told them they “always had a book inside them”. We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity. A world where people have simply surrendered to (or been beaten into submission by) the sleepwalk of work, domesticity, mortgage repayments, junk food, junk TV, junk everything, angry ex-wives, ADHD kids and the lure of eating chicken from a bucket while emailing clients at 8pm on a weekend.
Do the maths. We can function – sometimes quite brilliantly – on six hours’ sleep a night. Eight hours of work was more than good enough for centuries (oh the desperate irony that we actually work longer hours since the invention of the internet and smartphones). Four hours will amply cover picking the kids up, cleaning the flat, eating, washing and the various etceteras. We are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do whatever we want. Is what we want simply to numb out and give Simon Cowell even more money? To scroll through Twitter and Facebook looking for romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? To get nostalgically, painfully drunk in a pub where you can’t even smoke? “