I have a concern about the attitudes of people in martial arts classes. I know taekwondo is an individual undertaking. In a sense, there is no team. It is something you do. It is for your own self-improvement. But in another sense, we don't do it alone.
We all have teachers. I know there are a lot of books on the martial arts and you can learn a great deal from books. But books have limitations. You need the help of an instructor to learn taekwondo.
We also have classmates who help us. They help teach us and they are our partners during one step sparring and prearranged sparring. They challenge us during free fighting. In all this, we have friends who help us progress.
But there is an individual mentality that seems to permeate the martial arts schools. When I was learning (and I still am learning) I studied on military bases under American instructors who taught us to fight. They pushed us hard. But through it all we had a sense that we were all one class. We were a family and our classmates were our friends. We trained hard and we fought hard against each other, but when we bowed out at the end, we went home friends. We had no desire to hurt one another and made no plans to cause someone to get hurt. Even in our free fighting we had no desire to either hurt or to get hurt. We were friends. We fought hard but we watched out for each other and took care of each other.
I am afraid a lot of fighters today are forgetting that. They are in it for themselves and they forget to take care of their friends.
We all know that we are taekwondo fighters ... fighters ... when you step into the ring there is always a chance that we could get hurt. I see fighters today who take a good in the side of their head and immediately go back to do as much damage as possible to the person who hit them. We forget that we are friends and having fun so it is easy to get angry and want to hurt the person who hurt us.
My friends, anger, revenge, cheap shots, wild shots, these things have no place in the taekwondo dojang. Our master is our father in the art. The senior instructors are our older brothers and sisters. We are all each other's brothers and sisters. Inside the dojang, we are a family. We are friends. My dad would say "kinfolk." We watch each other's backs. We take care of each other. We are surprised and saddened when we hurt someone accidentally. And we never ever go out to intentionally inflict pain and suffering on one of classmates ... one of our kinfolk. I suggest we all have a heart check about where our minds and hearts are really at when we step onto the practice floor. We really need to think about what we are doing.
