Fighting For Something Greater.
This one's for the pandas.
There is one thing that has bedeviled my martial arts journey for the last 13 years. (And no, it isn’t guard pulling.)
It was something my Muay Thai Kru (coach) had told me before an upcoming competition…
To fight with honor, you have to fight for something greater than yourself.
It’s stuck with me ever since, not because it’s the moral principle that guides my life. Quite the opposite - it’s the one thing I haven’t been able to make sense of.
Fight for something greater than myself? What the heck did that mean? Dedicate the fight to saving the pandas?!
I just couldn’t reconcile how practicing martial arts was supposed to directly tie into “fighting for something greater.” To my mind, those seemed like two separate domains: being a good fighter vs. being a good person.
After all these years, I think I finally get it. I stumbled on it by reading “Mind Over Muscle” by Jigoro Kano (the founder of Kodokan Judo). In the book, he states…
“The purpose of judo is to perfect yourself so that you can contribute to society.”
On the surface, it sounds similar to what my Kru had told me. And ultimately, I think he and Kano Sensei were aiming for the same thing. But there’s something about Kano’s choice of words that seems to resonate.
“Perfect yourself so that you can contribute to society.”
I think, perhaps, I had confused “fighting for something greater” with some lofty goal like curing cancer or cleaning up the ocean.
(^Me, beneath the crushing weight of endangered panda awareness.)
What Kano seems to express is much simpler: use the practice of judo to better yourself into someone who helps others.
Maybe it’s something small, like giving encouragement to a beginner, offering a lift to a training partner, or helping a teammate feel sharp for their upcoming tournament instead of needing to “win” the roll.
Maybe it was that simple all along.
(PS - But also, save the pandas.)