My Own Fencing Epiphany
Both my personal brain care specialist and my acupuncturist suggested I take my tubby butt for walkies once in a while. Oddly enough for the same reason to. If I'm expending energy on my muscles I won't spend it multitasking in my head. Both of these specialist believe that most of my personal boogums would be beaten by single threaded thinking.
So, on Monday I planned to take a walk from work to the fencing class I help teach. Difficulty level? It is a 40 minute walk that I only had 30 minutes to take because I was distracted by several different things at once. Were I a smart man I would have realized that the answer to this problem is that the trip takes 40 minutes therefore the right thing to do was to leave ten minutes earlier, or accept that I would be ten minutes late. I didn't think of that though. My first response to the problem was simply to GO FASTER.
Nice. Very freakin' mature huh? So a mile in I hurt from my big toe to my waist and I couldn't seem to make myself slow down either. Or perhaps I was slowing down but it sucked so bad I couldn't tell. At any rate, it was in that place of idiotic agony that I slipped into a place of meditation where I ignored the warning signs of a failing body and focused on what was on my mind at the moment. Fencing.
In the years that I have been involved in fencing I have always stayed near the Divisional helm. Never captain, but always first mate, or at the very least bos'n. I have no desire or qualifications to lead but I have the loyalty to follow the captain all the way to Davey Jones if thats where the wind takes us.
I had during all this time always wondered what was wrong with the good smart people and clubs that ran silent. By that I mean some very good leadership talent was avoiding serving the division and went as far as to actively run away from any division level responsibility.
Now I know. That was the wisdom I found in the burning and shortness of breath. It was so simple and so obvious and I think I may have picked up my pace a little as punishment for not having though of it earlier.
Fencers by our very nature are unique and precious snowflakes no two alike. Our sport is a western martial art. It evolved from two people getting a sword, and one leaving in a box. The simple wisdom that came so late to me is that trying to be organized at a divisional level is taking on the job of cat herder. If there are ten fencers there are ten certain ways to get a single thing done and no one's budging from their plan. All of the others gave it a go, and quickly realized that they couldn't get their way even though it was so obvious that they were right. So those people shifted their focus to their own clubs which had been languishing because of the amount of energy they were throwing away trying to make the other clubs in the division see things their way. Their clubs, their membership rosters, and their level of competitive skill climbed immediately.
Then I thought about my own club. We are down two leaders; one, our matriarch, retired, the other lost interest in the sport due to issues in her personal life. Since they left our membership list shrank, our competitive list dropped to just two, and the remaining leadership were all hands on deck helping set up, run and tear down division events.
So what we really need to do is focus on our own club first and be there for the division if they need equipment or space to hold an event. *facepalm* The epiphany hits like a two ton heavy thing.
And like a reward from the cosmos itself, right at that moment, Cameron pulled up offering me a ride for the final third of the way to class.
