Ayn Rand once said that what “objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an ‘open mind’, but an active mind – a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically.” Exercising your active mind is the most critical component of living as a martialist, of being prepared for life’s challenges and for potential self-defense scenarios. The active mind is the key to awareness, the precursor to all successful self-defense. When you are aware of your surroundings, when you are aware of the ideas and the events with which you are presented, you are better able to cope with and respond proactively to life’s adversity.
Understanding the need for and the responsibility to train and prepare for self-defense is the first step to martialism. Unfortunately, many people don’t realize that it is the beginning rather than the goal. This is natural. Once we have decided to train for self-defense, we believe the decision process is complete and we need only to persist towards the goal of technical proficiency in whatever we have chosen. Once we have selected our training path, we often walk blithely down it. Our natural inclination is to trust our teachers, to feel faith in and loyalty for them.
When faith and loyalty supplant critical thinking, the student endangers himself. When blind trust supersedes the active mind, the student robs herself. When apologists usurp students willing to apply judgment ruthlessly and logically, martialists lose their ways.
What you cannot afford to do as a student, as a seeker of knowledge, is suspend your thinking process. You must approach your studies – and engage in them – with an active mind. All the while you are training, you must ask yourself: Is this of benefit to me? Is it logical? Is it reasonable? Am I being treated with respect? Am I progressing towards my goals? What are my goals? Is there a better way? Should I and can I investigate that?
To train while keeping these things in mind and analyzing critically all ideas to which you are exposed requires your vigilant attention to the details, tenor, and character of your training. It requires you to ask why and how if you do not understand something – and to evaluate the answers you receive to see if they are satisfactory. You cannot afford simply to back down when presented with an answer; you must judge the answer to determine if it truly addresses the question satisfactorily.
Engaged in this process, you may well encounter a situation in which you must change your training. Martialists often seek commercial (formal and informal) and non-commercial training in self-defense and the martial arts. It is natural to become quite devoted and loyal to a given school, its teacher(s), and the system or art imparted there. The longer you train and the more involved with your teachers and fellow students you become, the more difficult will be the choice to move on. I know; I’ve been through it myself, as have many of you reading this.
Nonetheless, you may decide that the school at which you are training is not for you. If you are fortunate, you will leave on good terms, with you, your former teachers, and your former classmates understanding that while the training was not what you wanted, no animosity or hostility is implied.
This will not always be the case. While I am happy to say that any student-teacher relationships I’ve previously enjoyed have continued happily or been dissolved positively (immediately or eventually), I am aware of some fellow students who’ve not had the same good fortune.
When you’ve been on the inside, it is often very difficult to find yourself on the outside looking in. When you’ve been a member of a school, of a martial fellowship, it is often very difficult to accept that you are no longer considered a sibling. To suddenly find yourself considered a heretic, a ronin, an unbeliever, is both alienating and depressing – particularly if those whom you considered friends suddenly cast aside that friendship. Many believe friendship transcends affiliation – and they are often disappointed to find their “friends” do not share this sentiment.
While it may seem like something out of a bad Kung Fu movie, be prepared to make enemies of the staff and student body of any school or program you depart, particularly if your former students and teachers have any reason to believe you will speak to others – any others – of your experience among them. You will suddenly be confronted with just what it means to be on the outside. Prepare yourself:Be prepared for your former teacher(s) to revise history where you are concerned. While you may believe you enjoyed a good relationship with your instructor(s), your departure will be seen by some teachers as an insult. They will respond by selectively remembering or completely rewriting their recollections of your time with them. You will, in effect, be unjustly vilified. Your teacher’s assessment of your skill level will be drastically lowered, while his willingness to communicate publicly that assessment will increase dramatically. Problems you supposedly experienced as a student – perhaps problems of which you have no memory or knowledge and which were not communicated to you while training at your former school – will suddenly become major issues.
To hear your former instructor tell the tale, you will be the worst possible disappointment as a student. Your choice to leave of your own free will may be recast as a “failure to cut it” or some other form of unworthiness. In short, you will be described as someone your instructor would never have wanted as a student, your departure retroactively presented as a favor to the school or as your instructor’s own idea or desire. The second home you knew will suddenly be the bastion of the enemy – an enemy characterized by dishonor and betrayal. You will feel alienated, persecuted, and maligned.
Be prepared for your former classmates to support your teacher. It is natural for those on the inside to feel a camaraderie, a kinship, and a loyalty to each other and to their teachers. Students often defer to their instructors, trust them to varying degrees of blindness, adopt their biases and preferences, and close ranks to defend their teachers when those teachers feel threatened or insulted. Do not count on ties of friendship to outweigh this natural tendency, because they usually won’t.
You will find that your former classmates share your teachers’ revisionist assessment of you and that they will see any perceived affront to one as an insult to all. Don’t count on your former “friends” to think for themselves. Put yourself in their shoes. If you were on the inside and your teacher made it known that a traitorous former student had insulted or attacked the school, you would bristle at that. You’d be eager to defend your school and your instructors. You’d believe.
Be prepared for challenges. Those feelings of loyalty will prompt your former fellow students to see you as the enemy – and some of them may act on this. If your former school is located in the community where you live or work, you may well encounter your former classmates or teachers while out and about. Some may be content to ignore you or to glare at you. Others may take it on themselves to “have it out” with you and tell you off. Some may take the coward’s path and simply mutter (or shout) insults and profanity. Be prepared for the feelings of persecution and injustice that accompany these sorts of personal attacks. Be prepared to defend yourself and avoid a physical confrontation at all costs.
Be prepared to be judged not on what you’ve said, but on what others think you’ve said. Negativity and melodrama are powerful forces. When you’ve managed to anger someone who speaks publicly about his anger, the dispute will draw spectators – most of whom don’t care who’s done what to whom. They are there only to watch the train wreck. If those angry with you speak loudly and often enough about what they claim you’ve said to insult them, if they repeat their revised histories with sufficient volume and vigor, what you’ve actually said and done will be lost in the noise overpowering your signal.
Mischaracterizations will be repeated as fact – and suddenly you will find yourself in a lose-lose scenario. You may try to address those mischaracterizations in the face of a hostile audience motivated to believe whatever they wish to believe, in effect trying to answer to their satisfaction questions framed like the classic, “When did you stop beating your wife?” If you refuse to address these accusations, you will be told you can’t “handle the criticism,” or that you don’t wish to address those questions and must therefore be hiding something. Either way, the power of negativity will overwhelm whatever positive message you try to send – or that you were trying to send.
Be prepared for the scorn of those not involved in the dispute. Martial arts communities have their own networks, loyalties, and lines of communication. If you leave a school or a teacher and that teacher is insulted by this departure, be prepared for him to make his displeasure known throughout the community, spreading his version of events to those with whom you have little or no contact. If you switch to a different school or instructor, don’t be surprised if your former teacher contacts your new teacher and tries to “poison the waters” at your new home.
Don’t be at all surprised if teachers or students you’ve never met will respond to inquiries about you with, “That guy? I heard he can’t be trusted.” Don’t be fooled by the image of an instructor as someone above such petty machinations. Any teacher who is capable of taking your departure personally is capable of trying to cause trouble for you with those he sees as his brothers and sisters in the arts.
Be prepared to find your own way. The active mind is the means of determining ought from is. It is the mechanism through which you determine, as a sovereign individual, what you must do in responding to the circumstances and events with which you are presented. It is the tool you use to find your way, to determine your path – regardless of what that path concerns. Whether you’re trying to pick a graduate education program, find a martial arts school, buy a car, cook a meal, plan a travel route, or propose marriage, the active mind is the means through which you will do this and do it correctly.
Do not be intimidated. Try not to feel alienated. Remind yourself that you – and only you – can choose your actions and take your decisions.
Be prepared – and walk outside until you find a new way indoors.