“Leave your ego at the door,” “There is no ego on the mats,” and countless other sayings. As martial artists, we’ve all heard these sayings again and again, but do we really understand them? While training recently, I heard someone say “well, it was just a face crank, I wasn’t going to give it to them.” Another partner said that they were being smothered and that teammates should be a bit more considerate of these things. The sentiment that ego [...]
Recently I was commenting on a public forum (ok… it was Facebook…) that I would be willing, in a heartbeat, to go back overseas to combat. One of the guys I served with and subsequently work on Veterans issues with asked me something that I honestly had to thinking about; “Why”. I knew I wanted to go back over but I couldn’t exactly nail down the “why”. Why would I want to go back and live through that all [...]
In one of my previous blogs I made the argument that one of the biggest issues transitioning Veterans experience, but really all Veterans regardless of how long they have been out, is a lack of empathy for civilians and all around apathy for when they complain about “their problems”. While at first we try to show understanding, because we know this is how “normal, society driven/controlled” people do it. But when it is just constant bickering, and it seems [...]
