Hurry up so I can tell you that time is an illusion
Published: Thu, 01/08/15
Some years ago I attended a residential course with an alternative spirituality theme. For reasons I won’t go into we managed to arrive very late and when the organiser greeted us she was quite agitated and said that we should have been there two hours ago and now we were ten minutes late for the current session. We apologised and were hustled in to the current talk just as the speaker declared that. “Time is an illusion. There is only the now.” Okay, I remember thinking, tell that to the lady organising this event and getting stressed about us being late.
There is of course such a reality as, lets call it ‘social time’, which makes it possible to have an organised society. Even this is a relatively modern concept in that until the coming of the railways in the 1840s that there was a need for standardised time over the whole country. Before that people lived according to ‘sun time’ and the church clock. This meant that in say 1800 mid day in Bristol was around 10 minutes later than it was in London.
Leaving aside social time as a useful convention the big issue about time is whether you are present now, dwelling on the past or speculating about the future. Of course you are still in the now regardless of what you are thinking of but are you conscious of it? When teaching Stav one thing I often repeat is.
“Respond to what is happening now, not what just happened or what you think is going to happen.”
Sounds obvious but it is surprising how often we are actually playing catchup to a situation that has actually passed or rushing to reach the future first. I know a lot of martial arts put the emphasis on speed and power but I am not convinced these are the real priorities. In my view if you do the appropriate thing at exactly the right time then you will get the results you need. A flurry of massively powerful punches which do not connect with a vulnerable part of the body will have much less effect than, say, an elbow strike in the throat which your opponent effectively walks onto. The way to be in the right place at the right time is to work with your opponent’s timing not always try to be faster.
Another factor is that if you can do anything correctly very slowly you can speed it up as much as necessary. But if you can’t do it right then trying to cover your lack of skill with speed is not going to help, probably just make things worse. Think of it like learning to drive, you start off slowly and only a very good driver should drive very fast (and preferably then on a race track.)
So martial arts training which slows the practitioner down and brings them into the moment will make for more effective self-defence application if required. If you can relax, slow down and be present then a situation that might have escalated into violence then it is likely that calm may be restored instead of conflict. If it is still necessary for force to be used then only the minimum appropriate action will be taken. Of course, the benefits of relaxing, slowing down and being present applies to all of life which of course is what you are training for.
So arts that include very slow and gentle practices such as the Stav Stances or Qi Gong are often dismissed as impractical and irrelevant but in fact they bring you into the now and make you conscious of the fact.
regards
Graham
P S I would like to remind you about the Stav Camp in July in Somerset http://www.stavcamp.org and tomorrow I will be making an announcement about further training opportunities in 2015.