ANGRY?

 By Phillip Starr

I was mad enough to spit nails...I'd just started the broadsword form that my teacher was teaching me, and I messed up AGAIN in the SAME SPOT! Sifu Chen didn't move. He just stood there, waiting with his arms folded. I shook my head in disgust at my incompetence and said, “I'm sorry. I messed up AGAIN.” As I prepared to start over, sifu walked up and slapped my shoulder with a loud thwack. “Anger...you cannot afford it! It is a luxury!”

For a couple of seconds, I thought that that was a rather strange way of looking at this all-too-common emotion. But like so many things that sifu said which, on the surface, seemed rather odd, it was worth thinking about. Anger is a luxury because it permits us to focus our attention on only one thing; ourselves. Remember the last time your car stalled in traffic, or you got to the checkout counter at the supermarket and found that you'd forgotten your wallet? At times like these, nothing else in the world was on your mind but YOUR immediate problem. Your mind takes a little vacation...

In an actual fight – the kind of situation where that form was intended to be applied (or any of the others I had learned), that kind of self-indulgence could have cost me my life. As a martial arts practitioner, the price I'd have to pay for the luxury of getting angry was much too high. Some believe that anger “pumps us up” and for some simple situations, that may work – like kicking down a door. But in close combat where one must maintain an awareness of distance, timing, the possibility of multiple assailants – anger has no place at all.

Police officers, soldiers, and other such persons whose vocation may cause outbursts of anger are well aware of the consequences of relying on adrenaline-fueled anger to face emergencies. It wastes energy indiscriminately (usually when we need it most), it robs us of self-control precisely when we need to maintain complete control, and it blurs our minds so that we do not accurately see what is before us. As martial arts practitioners, it is an emotion that we cannot afford to indulge.