I admit that the title of this post is a bit misleading. I didn't have a life of violence, just a life of preparing for, and on occasion, engaging in it.
In previous posts I've written about how I started doing martial arts when I was fifteen, and how learning to fight eventually had me protecting my friends in the freaks and geeks squad from bullies. And joining the military just after 9/11. After returning to civilian life, despite all my efforts to the contrary, I got forced into a career in private security.
Basically, my whole life has been preparing for fights. The amount of actual fighting has been low, but I'm going to chalk that up to fortune favoring the prepared. That, and being a giant. People usually don't want to fight someone that's 6' 4".
Now that I'm 40, that may be coming to an end.
A few years ago I went to see a doctor for pain in my right shoulder. I may or may not have written about this, I don't remember. But the doctor found a calcium deposit on my shoulder. Some minor surgery with a needle and it was removed. Unfortunately another one came back a month later and the doctor told me that I would need to have more extensive surgery on it, requiring time off from work and wearing a shoulder sling. Because this is America and we don't get paid medical leave, I had to turn it down. So I lived with pain in my shoulder for the past five or six years. It's been more of an inconvenience than anything. Hard to lift big, but otherwise not a problem.
Anyway, my job gives me paid time off now, so I decided it was time to get my shoulder fixed.
Of course my shoulder is even more fucked up now. Why wouldn't it be?
The doc was less concerned with the calcium deposit, and more concerned that the cartilage in my shoulder had been partially torn and was no longer attached to the socket in my shoulder. Without surgery, I may end up losing the use of my arm.
So yeah, that's great.
If you did martial arts in the 90s you know pretty much everything there's ever been said by or about Bruce Lee. So being one of many former superfans of the man, I thought back to a documentary that talked about how at the age of 35, Bruce Lee began getting scared of becoming old. He didn't want to be unable to fight or lose his strength. And like me, Bruce Lee spent his life preparing for violence. And like me, he was scared of being unable to do violence.
Did I just compare myself to Bruce Lee? You're damn right I did. It's my blog, I make no apologies. Deal with it.
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| Really dude? Really? |
There wasn't much said about Bruce Lee's childhood that showed what made him have the drive that he did. I remember in my teenage years of being driven by a trauma of being bullied and I wonder if Bruce Lee had the same issue. I do remember that he got in Wing Chun after being in a few street fights. It wasn't until a few years ago that I learned that he didn't just do Wing Chun in his teenage years. He did every martial art he possibly could. Boxing, fencing, kung fu. If he was able to learn it, he did. I don't think anyone gets that obsessed with martial arts unless you have trauma making you have the constant threat of violence being done against you in the back of your mind.
So now that I'm older than Bruce Lee was when he died, my body is starting to show the signs of aging, and it's scary.
I'm getting too old to prepare for violence, and when you've spent your whole life preparing for violence, that's a scary thought. What am I if I can't do violence? I don't even know. My last post talked about politics being such a large part of my identity for a long time, but preparing for violence has been a part of it for much longer than that. And I don't know who I'm going to be now that the sun is setting on that chapter of my life. My future is becoming one big unknown, and it's at a time when the future of the world is becoming one big unknown as well. I'm getting old when the world seems to be living in one massive historical event after another.
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