A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post talking about inspiration and started to explore what inspires me. I found that I actually had an answer to what I thought was a hard question, but as I wrote the post I felt my thoughts becoming organised.
I then found that I was juggling trying to think my thoughts, and trying to write in a peudo-entertaining fashion, and opted to publish the post as-is so I could focus on the thinking with the promise of returning to the subject. As you might have guessed, this is that promise kept. That said, I have to admit that this took longer to write.
If you’d like to read the previous ‘part one’ post, it can be found here:
This will inspire you(r sarcasm)
Rephrasing the Question
I think my original problem was that I was trying to focus on “inspiration” as a word or concept. Even on reflection, I think I am generally not someone who is inspired by things. There will be the rare exceptions of course, but on the whole I don’t see something online and thing “I want to do/try/make that.”
Which leaves another question. Why do I choose to do what I do? It was this act of rephrasing the question I think that helped the most. For example instead of asking “What inspires me?”, changing it to “what motivates me?“. What made me restart blogging?
“That’s going to bug me“
Do you remember about a month back, I posted a rant about a load of bullshit in Black Belt Magazine? The TL;DR of it being that they published a factually inaccurate article which I then spent a day debunking. All in all it was actually a waste of my day. It was a Saturday and I had more important things to do, but I spent it debunking anyway.
I cite that post as an example. I knew the correct answers because I had spent the time learning them. As I have said before, I am a 2nd dan in traditional/Japanese Ju-Jitsu, and I help run the class I was taught at alongside my Sensei. When the UK went into lockdown due to covid, our classes shut too. While many martial arts clubs moved to some form of online classes, we couldn’t. I did share some old archive kata videos on our clubs YouTube channel and share a series of martial arts glossary definitions weekly, but I wasn’t teaching.
I wanted to still teach the students something relating to martial arts. I don’t recall how or why, but I chose to write an article on ‘The Unwashed Black Belt’ myth. It’s something I had seen written on other sites before, but they all fell into one of two groups; they either treated the myth as historical truth or told the reader it was a myth without explaining how it was a myth or what the truth is. That is what I sought to correct.
It took me a couple of weeks to do, but I did it! I properly researched it and cited sources, which I am really proud of!
Which leads me to my bookcase. All throughout that time I was buying books. Mostly on the subjects of Jujitsu, Judo and martial arts, as well as figures within those worlds. How can you learn about the history of Judo without reading about Kanō Jigorō. If you had told me even just a few years ago that I would be buying books, some of which I still have not read yet, for the sake of citing them in articles I wrote, I would not believe you. Yet here we are. I had to buy a bigger bookcase after Christmas.
Inspired by mysteries
Yes I wrote that 1st article with the intention of teaching something and making sure it was accurate, but I enjoyed the investigative part of it too. The same thing happened with the two follow up articles I wrote. There is a 4th one in the works, even if that one is proving difficult. As I read more and learn more, I see questions I don’t know the answer to, and want to find those answers.
I’m not talking big questions either. Most of the ‘questions’ I had researched for are totally trivial but I wanted to know the answers anyway. The best example of this was when I tried to find out more about the invention of the stereotypical martial arts uniform.
Time after time I found many sources saying that the uniform was either invented or developed by Kanō Jigorō, with nothing else to add. Have you heard of the proverb “necessity is the mother of all invention“? What was the necessity for Kano to invent ‘white pyjamas‘? That was the impetus for my article exploring the history of the uniform itself. In the grand scheme theme of things, it adds nothing. No martial artist gains anything knowing where the uniform came from. But it’s fun to know.
Was it fun writing that article? That’s not the word I would pick, and I think when I was deep in the weeds of the details it was a little confusing, but once the article was finished, I was really damn proud of it.
What am I doing now?
The other half of the question “Why do I choose to do what I do?” is what am I planning on doing, or working on right now?
As I’ve said, I am trying to work on a 4th martial arts article for my clubs website. This one will look at the rank of black belt and how it has been viewed over time. The impetus for that article was learning that the first people in the world to earn their black belts, did so after just 15 months, whereas today people expect that it should take a few years at minimum to earn that rank. Thus, what changed?
It’s at this point I’m struggling to think of what else I am working on. I would say my time is limited but I recently I have been falling into the Minecraft trap. Get home from work, decide to unwind for a bit, take a break to eat dinner, but still come back to it and whoops it’s suddenly 11pm, I have work in the morning so better get to bed. Rinse and repeat. Honestly that says more about my mental health habits rather than anything else.
The only only thing I can think of that I am planning on doing, is to do with my Jujitsu clubs syllabus. We’re part of a wider governing body so have little to no input into what goes into the syllabus, but for many years now the syllabus has been taught as English only. The argument has always been that you don’t need to know what something is called in a foreign language, you need to be able to do it. But then when our members go to seminars or mix with people from other martial arts, they start throwing out these terms and we have no idea what they are on about.
All I planned to do was to re-add the Japanese names back to the syllabus. But as I also did not learn them in the first place, I need to do that first so that I don’t mislabel anything. The other thing I might do it take a set of instructional notes written by one of our other coaches and add them to each technique. These were notes he wrote for himself as a revision aide so some of them only make sense to him, and I would need to translate that.
I say I ‘might’ do this because adding these notes would make each syllabus look longer. The white belt syllabus might go from a 1-page list of things the student needs to know, to a 3-page list. It might make it look overwhelming to a new student.
Otherwise, I think about what I’d like to do but for whatever reason can’t.
- I had been going to the gym prior to my back injury, and I might be able to restart that soon but I’m not sure yet.
- I would like to maybe try another martial art, probably Judo or Brazilian Jiujitsu, but maybe Karate or Aikido. The biggest limiting factors here being time and money.
- There’s what I want to write here on the blog, but this is an ongoing thing where at the moment I am writing what I want when I want to, rather than with any sort of schedule or niché topic in mind.
Talking to a Void called 'the Internet' 