Haunted

For years I’ve striven for automaticity—to act without thinking.  Thought is slow, and thinking too much slows the game down.  By the time I think my way into a technique—into a defense, an attack, or a tactic—the opportunity has passed.  Fast as my mind might be, my eyes and body are too slow to harness the power of thought.

To compensate for my limitations, I endeavor to create internal motor programs.  They are scripts initiated by certain stimuli.  When my opponent throws a leg-kick, I check the kick and, as I set my foot down, return with a cross and a hook then with a kick of my own.  It’s a combination I’ve been using for years.  I don’t think about it when I’m sparring.  I just do it.  I do it without contemplation.

I’ve been training for a long time.  I’ve developed scripts that make me look fast or like I know what I’m doing.  If my opponent places a hand in a certain place in a certain way, my body has a hard-wired set of reactions to respond with.  I react without thinking, and I’m often quite effective.  I’ve trained those reactions into my body.

But what about the times when I’ve taught myself the wrong script?

One of the first Jiu-jitsu concepts I understood came from side-control defense.  It was a reversal from one of the worst positions in all the combat sports pantheons.  I learned it and loved it.  It was one of the first places I began to understand the ideas behind what made Jiu-jitsu work.  There was a way that my coach explained it that made sense to me—it was probably the only thing that made sense to me at that stage in my journey.

I drilled it and trained it nearly to the point of mastery—I got pretty good at it.  I could take my bad position under side-control and reverse it so I was on top in side-control.  It was a good technique that worked for me.

I became so adept at it that I started allowing sparring partners to pass my guard so they could get into side-control—so that I could reverse their side-control.  I didn’t understand other aspects of Jiu-jitsu all that well, but I understood how to escape side-control, so I developed a habit of accepting it.  It was a poor tactical choice, but it was working for me.

Over time I came to realize that allowing opponents into side-control was a terrible idea.  It didn’t take long before I was sparring more talented opponents and they stopped falling for my simple tricks.  They refused to take the bait, and I would find myself in inferior position.  I’m not the smartest grappler in the world, but I was smart enough to recognize that I needed to fight harder against bad positions.

I purged that tactic from my Jiu-jitsu repertoire.

To get better at Jiu-jitsu I had to make several changes, and one of the most important changes to make was to avoid side-control.  I trained and drilled to fight differently.  I forced myself not to give up so easily, even though I knew a cool escape.  It was bad strategy, and the bad strategy needed to go away.

But it never went away.  It lived inside me like a ghost.

For years—actual years—I tried to train my willingness to fight from inferior position out of my mind and body.  My guard got better, my defense grew stronger, and I would go months at a time without my weird old habit showing up. 

But then it would—it would suddenly awaken at awkward times, often in the middle of my most important competition moments.  I would unwittingly accept a bad position for no definable reason.  It was a motor program I once developed.  It was the ghost of an old tactic that haunted me.

I fight it to this day.  It still haunts me.

I know that my past defines me—it’s the accumulation of everything I’ve been up to where I am now.  My past exists inside my mind in the form of memory, and I can’t help but wonder if I would still be me without my memories.  If every one of my memories were to leave my mind would my personality also disappear?  It’s a fun thought experiment.

I think I have the opposite problem, though.  I’m not terribly worried about losing grip on my memories.  I am far more worried about the overabundance of memories constantly vying for my attention.  Memories hold weight in my mind, and the ones with the most weight get to decide who I am.  At least, that’s how it feels.

I carry memoirs of my past on the outside and the inside.  The ones on the outside are easy to see.  My face is visibly scarred, and I can put a name to every opponent or sparring partner who left a mark.  There are some other physical injuries that aren’t as easy to see, but they are noticeable in the way I move.  My body is always striving to accommodate something that hurts or functions poorly.  That’s what the human body does.  It’s an amazing machine like that.

The way I move through life—both on and off the mats—is a product of habits developed over time.  The recollections of my past choices live in my body because they reside in my mind.  They take the form of memory, and memory is the foothold that gives my past authority over my future.  Some of those memories are subtle, floating at the edges of perception.  Others are overtly obvious in the form of scars and wounds.

I fight ghosts every day. 

I didn’t like the way my coach was staring at me.  He stopped for a moment, focusing on my partner and I.  His arms were crossed and a stern look of disapproval was on his face.  I knew better than to say anything.  I kept drilling the takedown he had taught.  My partner and I were knocking out repetitions, and I felt like I was doing the technique like I was supposed to.  But I didn’t like the way my coach was looking at me.  Finally, after a few uncomfortable moments, he stopped me.

“Why are you doing that thing with your foot?” he asked.

I didn’t know I was doing a thing with my foot.

“Do it again,” he told me.  “Show me the takedown.”

I did.  I did what he told me.  I set up the takedown almost exactly as he had taught, then changed levels and speared my weight forward.

“Stop,” he said.  “Stop right there.  Look at your foot.  It’s pointed the wrong way.”

He was right.  Of course he was right.  He’s my coach for a reason, and he’s a good coach.  I paused and looked at my foot and realized that it was pointed in a weird direction.  I hadn’t even realized the angle—it was an awkward angle.  I had to think about things for a moment before I responded.

“I hurt my knee a while back,” I told him.  “It hurt whenever I changed levels unless I turned my foot like this.  It was the only way I could change levels without pain.”

“OK,” he shrugged.  “Is it still hurt?”

“No,” I replied.  “It healed up a while back.”

“Good.  Then stop doing it wrong.  That’s bad technique.”

"Everything is permissible," but not everything is helpful. "Everything is permissible," but not everything builds up. (1 Corinthians 10:23) 

I do so many things wrong without knowing that they ‘re wrong.  I perform without thinking.  They appear as unconscious coping strategies and defense mechanisms.  That’s a stark reality—the reality that my scripts are running without the benefit of thought.  They’ve become so engrammed that I don’t notice anymore.  They arrive and exit without my consent because they’ve become automatic.

Many—if not most—of my coping mechanisms were the result of necessity.  I needed them at some time.  They were created for the purpose of survival.  They protected me or provided something I wanted.  I defended hurts and harms because the alternative was pain.  I considered what it would require to keep myself momentarily safe and learned to accommodate my woundings.  I defended myself until I didn’t have to think anymore.  My actions became automatic.  They were scripts without deliberation.

But, like anything, they ran their course.  They outlived their usefulness.  They became liabilities rather than advantages.  I had consciously assimilated them until they became unconscious actions that required no effort from my mind.  When they stopped being of value, I had no idea how to rid myself of them—in most cases, I barely knew they were there.  They lived like ghosts in my mind, hijacking my actions before I became aware.

They haunted my unconscious.

Many of them still do.

Fighting with the young guys makes me feel young.  Those moments allow me to live like I am for just a few minutes longer.  It keeps me alive and it keeps me relevant.

It was a kickboxing night, and the rounds were good.  I rotated through a few partners and traded a few blows before I found myself in front of one of the tougher kickboxers.  We touched gloves and got to work.

I’d already sparred a couple rounds with him that night and several rounds in previous nights.  He was talented, and it was fun to watch him grow as his skill increased.  He was always eager to work with me and open to coaching.  He was a fun fight.

We were less than a minute into the round.  I was doing my best to circle away from his power, and he was doing his best to cut off my movement.  It was a pure form of mat chess.  He was a little bit taller than me—which is somewhat rare at my weight—so I was making a few adjustments with my footwork.

He didn’t leave much of an opening, but I saw it when it appeared.  It was just a slight misstep.  I’ve been fighting for a long time, and I’ve been coached by some of the best.  My eye is trained to see errors, even if they are small.

I exploded forward, pushing off my back foot and firing a short jab followed by a long cross and a left-right to the body.  As my punches landed, he defended, but I had prepared for defense—it was part of the combination.  Knowing his weight had shifted, I planted my foot and fired a sharp kick toward his leg.

Suddenly he wasn’t there.  My kick found nothing but air.  I was turning to find balance when I encountered his right hand.  I found it with my face, saved from the worst of the blow only by the fact that was disciplined enough to keep my hands up and shoulders rolled forward.

We paused mid-spar and I nodded, acknowledging that he’d touched me cleanly.  There’s no other way than to acknowledge it happened.  It’s a form of respect.

“I’ve been studying that combination you throw,” he raised an eyebrow with a sly grin.  “I’ve been drilling to beat it.”

I hadn’t even realized I had a combination I threw.  I thought I was being spontaneous.  I thought I was simply deploying effective tactics and living in the moment.

I hadn’t realized that the combination was something I threw, because I hadn’t realized how automatic it was.

Because sometimes I’m haunted. 

I fight ghosts every day.

It’s easy to define myself by the worst things that have happened to me and the ways I learned to adjust.  I can’t pretend they haven’t happened.  They manifest in the ways I have learned to protect the rawness of my wounds and hurts.  They once served a purpose, but once that purpose has faded, I don’t know if I know how to be rid of them.

I could think of them as maladaptive—as scripts, procedures, or programs that serve no positive purpose.  They did once serve a purpose.  I developed these systems because there was a time I believed I needed them.  Maybe they were effective at the time.  It’s also possible that they were never effective.  At the time they shielded and protected or helped me avoid an unfamiliar pain by insisting on the embrace of familiar pain.

Either way, they did serve a purpose once.  They were there for a reason, and even though that objective longer exists, the scripts remain.  I continue to revert to them.  I access them unconsciously and unwillingly, executing purposeless programs without the benefit of mindfulness.  They arise out of mind, subtly and unnoticed like the ghosts they are—like the ghosts that haunt my thoughts and behaviors.

(Romans 7:19)  For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do.

It was an insignificant injury—a small thing that limited my movement slightly.  I probably shouldn’t have been training.  I should have been taking some time off, but I’m not  smart at that kind of stuff.  I decided I wanted to train anyhow.

When the young fighter asked me for a couple rounds I was too prideful to tell him I was injured.  I didn’t want to admit my weakness, not to him or to myself.  I shouldn’t have been so surprised when he accidentally and ignorantly put pressure on the place where I hurt.  After all, he was a good fighter, and he was bound to do something right—something right that was something wrong for my injury.  The shock of that pressure jolted my mind awake and a wave of internal anger roiled through my body onto my brain.

It activated a series of protective motor programs as I came to life.  The friendly match became instantly unfriendly, and that young fighter experienced the weight of my self-protective wrath without knowing why.  He had no idea what I had been protecting, because I hadn’t told him.  It was a phantom lying in wait for him to discover.  He had unintentionally found the edge of my defensive rage and never known why.  My injury wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t still move like a hammer, but it was bad enough that I would feel it later.  He would feel it, too, but he would never know why.

I like to tell myself that my ghosts harm nobody but me.  I’ve developed patterns and movements to protect my wounds, and I’m the only one who suffers when the phantoms appear.  But I’m wrong.  I’m wrong because I’m dishonest.  There is no honor in dishonesty.

I make an assumption that my future will be exactly like the past.  I rehearse that past until it becomes my future, even though the future is beyond my vision from where I stand.  My past strives to define my future.

But my God refuses to allow me to be satisfied with a past that haunts me.  He steps into the void and demands better.

"Do not remember the past events, pay no attention to things of old.  Look, I am about to do something new; even now it is coming. Do you not see it? Indeed, I will make a way in the wilderness, rivers in the desert.”   (Isaiah 43:18-19) 

“This is what I do.  It’s just who I am,” I tell myself and others when I feel my automatic reactions being triggered.  I revert to an identity that I’ve built for myself based on the ways I’ve taught myself to resist hurt.

Liars don’t get to be martyrs.  This is not who I am.

My God refuses to coddle my bad choices.  He refuses to let me cuddle with them by accepting them as part of who I am.  He tells me that I don’t get to build my identity on poor choices and bad decisions, or on the choices of others and the way they treated me.

The scripts I’ve written to defend myself from truth are not strengths.  I will not be permitted  to hide behind “that’s just the way I am” when the way I am is an excuse for failure and a defense for hurt.  Those are not who I am.  I was created to be different.

I can choose to accept the worst things about me as the things that define me.  I can use them to hurt and injure those around me and cause damage so I can fall back on the excuse that I, too, was once hurt.  But that would mean I don’t want to be better.  It would signal that I am satisfied with the abomination that almost resembles the me I was supposed to be. 

As much as I might want that, I don’t want it.  Nothing in my spirit is satisfied with being less than I was meant to be.  There is a voice inside of me, an unsettling sensation that something is wrong.  I can ignore it, but not for long.  Eventually that elusive unsettling expands until it the discomfiture demands my attention.  It demands to be interrogated.

The Spirit speaks softly in a way He knows I can hear.  He tells me that it’s going to uncomfortable and that He’s going to remind me of how maladaptive these habits are.  He’s going to remind me until I turn my face to the see what I’ve been striving so hard not to see.

Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith. Examine yourselves. Or do you yourselves not recognize that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless you fail the test.  (2 Corinthians 13:5) 

My God is not here to coddle my injuries.  He’s not going to celebrate them with me.  He’s not going to allow me to build an identity based on the hurts and failures of a time come and gone.  They are not who I am.  I was created for a purpose—for a purpose that is different from what I am choosing.

So it’s going to be uncomfortable.  It’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable being what I’m not supposed to be.

Still I am going to hide.  At least, I’m going to try to hide.  I’m going to secret myself away into isolation where I can refuse to face these ghosts that live inside my mind.  I’ll do all I can to ignore the discomfort of acknowledging that what has worked for so long is effective no more.

Even when I hide I can’t escape.

Where can I go to escape Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? (Psalms 139:7) 

The Spirit tells me in my heart—in that place where I try so hard not to listen—that He does not define me by worst moments, or by the past of what I once was.  Neither will He allow me to define myself that way.  I am not one with my ghosts.  They are not who I am or who I am meant to be.

When I allow the damages of my past to inspire my thinking in the future, I am choosing to allow the phantoms of yesterday to dissolve my thinking today.  Those ghosts may haunt my mind, but they don’t define my thinking.  Memories of failures and betrayals are not my self.  They are a representation of something that once happened, and they are happening no more.

It’s time to stop defending them.

I had no idea I could be this exhausted.  I’m ready to be finished.  But he’s not ready for me to be finished.

“Another round,” my coach demands as the bell rings.

He flashes the pads in front of my face.  I know the combination I’m expected to throw, so I throw it.  I don’t have as much speed or as much power as I had a few rounds ago, but I know better than to argue.  I launch my series of punches, then immediately cover up as he returns strikes toward my face.

That’s what we’re working on.  We’re training my defensive frame because it has a tendency to degrade when I throw punches.  He doesn’t like how low I carry my hands.

I told him it didn’t matter too much.  I told him I was willing to take a punch to give a  punch.  He told me that was stupid.  Why would I willingly get hit?  He told me it needed to change.

But it had been working for me for so long.  It hadn’t been working perfectly, but it had been working. 

He told me that it wasn’t going to keep working for me, not if I was going to start fighting better opponents.  We needed to address that habit and we needed to change it.

I had no idea how to do that.  The position of my hands, the mindset with which I fought—they were engrammed onto my very personality as a fighter.  They were an aspect—a significant aspect—of how I fought.  It was part of my identity.

But it wasn’t the best of who I was.  He saw that in me.  He saw that I could be better—that I needed to be better.  He knew that I needed to fight differently.  I had to unlearn being the kind of fighter I was so that I could learn to be the fighter I was designed to be.

I had no idea how to do that.

But he did.  That’s why he was my coach.

“Another round,” my coach demands as the bell rings.

Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.  (Romans 12:2)