Kung Fu

To me Kung Fu holds the promise of tangible knowledge: values and attitudes expressed in a nonverbal format. I can't trust words, I've given up on them. Words are the feeble, faustian diagrams we scribble to bind the changeling called truth. And when we turn our backs just for second to the noble prose,-- it morphs into a heap of toads. The truth is still the truth, make no mistake, just not what one thought it was, or, perhaps, what one wished so badly for it to be. After a lifetime of academia this is my conclusion: my academic learning was built upon striving, striving is based on accomplishment, accomplishment is born of desire, and desire is mother of suffering. In order to be happy one must align what one feels one should be doing with one is actually doing. If those two things are different, one can never, ever, be happy. One can pretend, but one cannot flee from one's one self.

Until that condition is met, the complete congruency of life and belief, any fleeting pleasure is just a topical treatment for underlying malaise. I can no longer see the value in structured academia. I never saw any to begin with, come to think of it, I just heard about and didn't bother to check my facts. Frankly, the years of failing to question the assumption that being a scholar was above all else led me to an inactive and lonesome life without meaning. My life to date, has borne a few good results: it has allowed me to craft my theories on existence, but now those theories condemn the very practices which bore them, and it is time for something else. It's time for Kung Fu!

I'm drawn to Kung Fu because, like dance, or song, no matter how useless or impractical it might seem in today's world, it's something I can internalize: Kung Fu doesn't rely on an outside source or context to be valid, it simply is what it is, it's physical, it's real. And I need some reality, something to ground me and save me, from nomadic philosophizing. I will say, not for the first time in history, that the principles of strategy remain the same across all scales. The sound strategies of Kung Fu all have corresponding actions in other areas of life. To find the right way of life once has only to translate those time worn movements into their underlying principles. Admittedly, this is not so easy, but at least it's a project.

Plus, I like to kick things.

(note, this post does need some revising. Due to languages standard and expected failure to express solely an authors intent, while eliminating other possible interpretations, as well as to my own haste this bit of writing is attributing attitudes to me that I don't, in reality, have. I will be back to fix it, but I really doubt that matters since nobody comes here in the first place)