Let’s start with a quote from Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius: “How ridiculous and strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life!”
These words are culled from Meditations, a series of loose but connected notes he wrote to himself while struggling to stay the course as he conducted a long military campaign against German invaders who’d penetrated into Italy.
In context, Aurelius’ notes cover both the mundane (court matters and human interactions) and the crushing (battles).
Yes, the battlefield of the second century involved significantly more hardship than we encounter today. Nevertheless, those 13 words of wisdom are as valuable now as they were when he wrote them because they can shape the way we approach self-protection — provided we allow his pragmatism to direct our course where it may be lacking.
More often than not, when we engage in real-world drilling, it takes place in sterile conditions. In other words, it’s conducted inside a dojo at a prearranged time. For most of us, it’s hard to get around this portion of drilling sterility, and that’s OK.
What’s worse, though, is that we often see sterility intrude into other aspects of our drilling that are most definitely under our control. If any portion of the short list presented below is a part of your routine, well, then, your drills just might be a bit sterile.
You know the technique you’re defending against at least 80 percent of the time.
You have a preselected or assigned defensive move at least 80 percent of the time.
You train in a gym at least 80 percent of the time.
You respond to attacks using your dominant side at least 80 percent of the time.
You train minus handicaps — physical, sensory, equilibrium, etc. — at least 80 percent of the time.
In short, spending the majority of your training time dealing with the known while purportedly preparing for the unknown seems a bit contradictory. Real life is far messier and far more chaotic than any drill. Yes, you must use drills to develop neural connections, but drilling with smoothness or sterility does not accurately reflect the nature of your battlefield.
As all students of real-world conflict know from having had a cursory look at security/battlefield/surveillance footage or even self-posted YouTube videos of assaults perpetrated by malignant scum, seldom do any of these encounters follow sterile protocols.
Yes, you can see common attacks (punches and tackles) and common scenarios (knives and guns), but how often does a right-in-front-of-your-very-own-eyeballs assault accurately reflect the drills or environmental conditions of your gym?
As a law-abiding citizen, you’ll always be surprised when violence strikes and immerses you in chaos because you never get to choose the time and place of an encounter with evil. So, in that aspect, you’re always disadvantaged.
However…You can allow your training to become “infected,” a term I use to describe letting what does occur in the real world influence your drills.
By including more of the chaos, more of the random variables, more of the never-planned-for aspects of assault that you can readily see in videos or hear about in firsthand accounts, you can go a long way toward inoculating yourself with the truth. And you can kill a bit of the sterility that’s doing you a disservice.
You’ll never be able to — nor would you want to — perfectly mimic the evil that inspires real violence, but training for reality as if it were the smooth world of a combat sport is denying the truth. Consider again the words of the emperor: “How ridiculous and strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life!” My clumsy rephrasing: “If it’s happened to others in your demographic, it can happen to you.”
That doesn’t mean it will happen to you, only that it can.
With this in mind, think about how you might allow your training to reflect the following real-world “infections.” (Merely reading their descriptions can put you on the path to devising scenarios that incorporate the variables.)
A shooting that takes place in a mall or workplace
An assault that forces you to respond while wearing dress clothes (shoes included)
A physical incapacitation that results from being injured, asleep, sick, nauseous, etc.
A situation in which you have young, elderly or infirm dependents to protect
An event at which you’re seated
An altercation in cramped quarters
An environment that’s very cold (to the point of making your grip weak)
A condition in which you can’t see well
I could go on, but that should be enough to illustrate the point. Many people who were not too different from you and me have had to face precisely such situations to survive, and the fact that we might choose not to place ourselves in drilling scenarios that mimic them means we’re perhaps closing our eyes to reality.
Whenever we decide to ignore what has and can happen in life and stick with sterile drilling, we’re being a bit less than intellectually honest — and perhaps irresponsible if we’re training students who are depending on us for guidance.
In a nutshell: Anyone who’s training to survive violence needs to allow those realities to affect how that self-defense training takes place. And reality, unlike sports or games, is always more than a little messy.