You should not speak of strong and weak long swords. If you just wield the long sword in a strong spirit your cutting will become coarse, and if you use the sword coarsely you will have difficulty in winning.
Wilder and his friend Kim had gone down the hill toward the river to visit with a bum who had been camping out in the area. Wilder remembers standing there wide-eyed in wonderment as the old bum and intermittent jailbird explained how to put a sharpened screwdriver or toothbrush into an unsuspecting fellow inmate. “You stick ‘em in the butt, right about here,” he said. “That way the leg doesn’t work so well and he can’t run from you.”
You may be thinking fistfight but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the other guy is too. Knives, guns, bludgeons, beer bottles, and a host of other nasty tools may be in your adversary’s arsenal. Think about that old jailbird’s advice. It’s chilling to think that he was counseling eleven-year-olds how to ambush someone in a fashion that ensured that the victim couldn’t escape until they’d be able to kill him. Sadly, that attitude isn’t really all that uncommon.
Whenever you fight, you are almost certainly going to get hurt, even if you don’t run up against a psychotic foe. It’s unavoidable if the battle lasts more than a few seconds. The real question is how bad you will get hurt. If he’s armed and you’re not, the damage will almost certainly be severe. If he’s bigger, faster, or stronger than you are, or he’s got friends that join in, it’s all bad. Remember, if he’s attacking, he thinks he can win and is probably cheating in some way in order to do so.
Take this example: most young men carry pocketknives these days. Many are willing to use them on you, either because they don’t fully appreciate the consequences of their actions or, in some cases, because they are too furious to care. Then again, they may just be a sociopath like that old jailbird.
Knives are great tools, yet they automatically bump the encounter up from simple assault to aggravated assault or possibly even murder. Use one on another human being without just cause and you’ll undoubtedly spend a whole lot of quality time in prison, yet your average street punk isn’t thinking that far ahead. He’s reacting to the emotions of the situation, paying attention solely to the encounter he’s in, right here, right now. In other words, all he cares about is defeating you, no matter how he has to go about doing it.
The vast majority of people who carry a knife have never used it as anything other than a tool for slicing fruit, opening envelopes, cutting down boxes, or similar routine endeavors. They have never hurt another human being with their blade. They have never seen what the smallest amount of blood can do, how the smallest amount of blood can make them lose their grip on the knife, slip on the floor, or lose their lunch down the drain. Unfortunately, they don’t need any experience, special skills, or extraordinary intelligence to hurt someone bad with that knife. Heck, most any sharp object will do.
If all you got was a few bruises on your arms after the fight, you did just fine. Unfortunately, most street fights don’t end quite so pleasantly, even for the victor.
Think for a moment about the type of person it takes to truly want to stick you with his knife, the guy who looks forward to ambushing you with a blade. Premeditated attacks are even worse than unhampered rage. Here’s why: knives are very intimate weapons. That means that if you’re facing the pointy end, the guy holding it either hates you with a white-hot passion or is totally out of his mind with fury and/or terror.
There is no reasoning with someone who is fully prepared to become drenched in your blood and viscera, to smell your bowels as they release, and to hear your cries for help as they fade to whimpers of pain and finally to the rattling gurgle of your last breath. If you are facing someone like this, he is ready, willing, and able to cut you as many times as it takes, to stab you as deep and as often as necessary to finish the job he has in mind. That kind of guy is real damn scary, be he a big brawny biker or skinny little computer geek. The blade makes them both deadly.
Fighting should be avoided whenever possible because you simply cannot predict the chaos and mayhem that comes along with it. If a knife or other weapon enters the fight, experience says that you are not very likely to see it before you have already been hurt. You will get hurt and you may get hurt very, very badly.
It’s hard for many people to visualize dying in a fight. Because of this, the threat of death isn’t really much of a deterrent for most young men. Visualize instead spending the rest of your life maimed, crippled, or grossly disfigured, confined to a bed or a wheelchair. Think about all the things you’ll never do and the places you’ll never see in such a condition.
Although all violence is bad, armed assaults are far more dangerous to the victim than unarmed ones. Sadly, ordinary citizens are victimized an average of 1,773,000 times per year by weapon-wielding thugs in the United States alone. While crimes of non-lethal violence committed with or without weapons were about equally likely to result in victim injury, armed assaults are three-and-a-half times as likely as unarmed encounters to result in serious damage to the victim, such as broken bones, internal injuries, loss of consciousness, or similar trauma resulting in extended hospitalization. Worse still, 96 percent of all homicides involve some type of weapon.
Because you are going to get hurt, it is prudent to end the fight as quickly as possible to minimize the damage. This means that if you cannot avoid fighting altogether, your initial response needs to place you in control of the momentum. You need to keep from getting hit, stop the other guy from continuing to strike, and do it in as few moves as possible. Once you have dealt with the immediate threat, your next move needs to cross him up, destroy his balance, or knock him on his ass. If he’s got a weapon, your response should be, if not fatal, at least severely disabling.
When you fight, you are almost certainly going to get hurt. It’s unavoidable if the battle lasts more than a few seconds. The real question is how bad it will be. If he’s armed and you’re not, the damage will be quite severe. It’s in your enlightened self-interest, therefore, to avoid fighting when possible and when it’s not, end confrontations as quickly as possible. Your initial response needs to place you in control of the momentum. If he’s got a weapon, it should be severely disabling if not fatal.
Recognize Your Own Limitations
He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.
It is difficult to know yourself if you do not know others.
There was an amusing scene on
Limitation comes in two flavors: inherent and manufactured. Inherent limitations are then broken into two more categories: mental and physical. Physical limitations are a hard wall to hit. You can work out in the gym to become stronger, practice speed drills to become faster, or perform aerobic exercise to build your endurance, yet you cannot get around your natural genetic limitations. Some people, for example, are blessed with an abundance of fast-twitch muscles. If you are not that lucky, you will never be as fast as someone who is, yet you can train yourself to become as fast as your body is capable of being. Some people are tall while others are short. You cannot change how you are born; you can only make the most of what you’ve got.
The more you are involved in a physical activity, the more in touch you are going to be with your body. Physical activities like aerobics, weightlifting, yoga, or martial arts, or tough jobs like logging or construction give you a contact with your body that is beneficial. It helps you understand what you’re physically capable of.
