What's your plan?
Everyone has blind spots. You, me, them – everybody. We can’t know everything and while we may add "all things considered" to our conversations, we can’t really have
considered all things.
Have you ever actually considered all things?
I was presented something I’d never considered a day or two ago, in the form of an article shared by a friend in “The Business.”
Y’know how I wrote about the difference between martial arts and self-defense?
Between those two articles, I thought I’d done a pretty good job.
It turns out there was something I’d never ever considered.
Read the linked article above. It’s something we’ve never once talked about.
And I don’t say this to my credit. If we think about it, something like this is
every bit as likely – perhaps much more likely – than life-or-death “entangled
encounters.”
When I previously wrote about self-defense, I did so within the context of a
spectrum of confrontation and options for it; everything from awareness and
avoidance to lethal force and use of weapons.
The linked article presents another “spectrum” entirely, with an altogether different class of "antagonist." More importantly, it requires a
different mindset.
In the realm of disaster preparedness,
there’s a school of thought to the effect that if one is ready for the
worst-case-scenario, he or she is therefore automatically prepared for
everything “less-than-worse.” If I’m prepped
for a zombie apocalypse, so the thinking goes, anything short of a horde of
shambling brain-eaters will be a cake walk.
A moment’s thought will show the flaw in such “logic.” If I’m ready to fend off wave-after-wave of
the Flesh-Eating-Undead, that’s not the same thing as being able to recover my
car from a snowy ditch after having hit a patch of black ice in winter. Or find my way through the pathless desert. Or repair a blown-out shoe when I need to run. Or extricate myself from a burning building. Or pay my gas-and-electric bill if I find
myself “between jobs” through no fault of my own. You get the picture.
In the same way, being able to put
a knife-wielding bath-salt tweaker in the hospital or morgue does not
automatically prepare me to safely and compassionately restrain a relative suffering
a psychotic break, and keep him or her from hurting themselves or others.
We are fortunate that tai chi seems almost uniquely suited to the “Uncle Joe,” “Aunt
Rachelle” or “Cousin Steve” scenarios in the linked article. Tai chi gives us a nearly infinite “menu” of
available responses, most of which can be “dialed-up-or-down” to suit the occasion. In other words, I don’t need to put Aunt
Rachelle in the hospital, because I have a host of options between “strong
language” and “Death-Bringer-Mega-Berserker®.”
We’ll spend
some time on this in the future.
