Looking in old boxes
Published: Thu, 10/29/15
We have had a change around at home and V and I have swapped rooms that we use as studies (or is mine a ‘man cave’?) Anyway, it has meant moving a lot of stuff and that means an opportunity to sort stuff out and get rid of what isn’t really needed any more. Another 80/20 lesson here, you will always find that 80 percent of what you do will be with 20 percent of what you have. Most of the time the rest of your stuff just hides in a cupboard, just in case you ever need it. A move around tends to bring that stuff to the surface and you have to confront the question of whether or not you really need any of it.
One thing that came to light for me was a box of mainly magazines going back almost 20 years. Actually a couple of items are more than 20 years old. The box contains the autumn 1992 edition of Fighting Arts International with the original Stav article by a writer called Harry Cooke. There were also another 16 magazines, most martial arts but not all, containing articles I wrote on Stav during the first 3 or 4 years that I was doing Stav. Some of them are quite good if I do say so myself.
There was a brief ‘golden age’ of cottage industry publishing between the mid 80s and the mid 90s. Around about 1985 digital typesetting became relatively affordable and accessible. Lithographic printing technology made smaller print runs economically viable. The Amstrad computer brought basic word processing to the masses around the same time. (Thanks to Alan Sugar). So producing a specialised magazine either independently or through a publishing house became more realistic than it had ever been before. There were motorcycle magazines such as Back Street Heroes, Custom car magazines, and all kinds of interests catered for by people passionate about their subject, not just big publishing houses looking to make an easy profit. The martial arts sector flourished too of course (and it was amazing how often Bruce Lee featured on the front cover event though by this time he had been dead for 15 years or so. Then by the year 2000, if not
before, the internet had pretty much killed off small scale publishing. The same content as used to be in specialist magazines could be distributed much more economically though the internet than by printing on paper and then selling by subscription or on newsagents shelves. In a sense that is progress. But there is a loss too. People actually made a living publishing such magazines and as I writer I would be paid for my efforts. Not a lot, maybe £40 or £50 but it still created a sense that there was value in writing and making it available to the reader. Now, if you want to be read on the internet you have to pay for traffic to come to your site and not someone else’s. Also, I can pick up a 20 year old magazine and read it again today pretty much as it was when it was current on the news agent’s shelf. How often can you not find a webpage again that you only read two days ago?
Okay, enough with the nostalgia. If you are reading this then the internet is doing its job. Someone said that; ‘change is the only constant’ and that is probably true. Glancing through the old articles I wrote I can see that I did grasp the essentials pretty much from the start. On the other hand I have learned an awful lot since. I should write more about it now. However, Stav is a body, mind and spirit training system which needs to be learned experientially not just read about. So here are some opportunities for me to share what I learned from Ivar and what I have done with that teaching since.
Saturday 31st October, Crewkerne, Self-defence seminar and axe seminar http://www.somersetstav.co.uk/sd.html
Saturday 14th of November, Salisbury, Axe Seminar. http://www.iceandfire.org.uk/train.html
May 14th to 16th 2016, Stav Training in the USA, to be hosted in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN http://iceandfire.us/events/index.html
regards
Graham