For the first few years after I'd started training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I must have been a fairly unbearable person to have in your friendship group. I'm lucky that I have still have friends from that time, around 2009 when I was living in the Hong Kong and making my first advances into martial arts at the ripe age of 27. I needed barely any encouragement to start talking about this wonderful new sport I'd found. I was desperate to tell people how great it was, or to even show them some moves. But like many people who I speak to on the mats, I struggled to articulate exactly why I was so enamoured.
If you search for BJJ inspiration on YouTube you’ll get loads of people talking about why jiu jitsu is so great and giving a lot of the same reasons. So I borrowed these when talking about it: jiu jitsu is great for breaking down your ego; jiu jitsu allows you to give full release to your aggressive instincts with less risk of being hurt or hurting anyone else because you can always tap; jiu jitsu puts you in very challenging situations and forces you to become resilient; jiu jitsu is like a cheat code for fighting; the people are great etc.
And all these reasons have some truth to them. But they also seemed simplistic in the face of what was really happening on the mats. I guess if you know you know, and it was enough to spend time with people in the gym that were of like mind, and understood what a great sport this was.
In the intervening 15 years since I first started training, I've met so many people on the mats of the places I’ve lived: Hong Kong, Rome, London, and all the gyms I've visited around the world, who share this bizarre passion. I'm not the only one that found this sport and didn't just start a new hobby, but rather became infected by something. Something that feels like a calling, a revelation, a transformation. We restrain ourselves from speaking honestly for fear of sounding like zealots or weirdos, when referring to something that appears to the uninitiated like a bit of play fighting tomfoolery.
But anyone who has committed themselves to this sport will have seen that there is something else going on. I've played football. I've played tennis. I've played snooker. These are all great sports, but I'll be damned if anyone is coming back from their first class, saying "I've found the thing I've been looking for all my life". But that's what I said to my wife after my first jiu jitsu class.
That’s the other thing – because jiu jitsu is a less established sport and the kind that people tend to find later in life, initiation into the ranks has the feel of a religious conversion, and converts are always more zealous than those that have grown up in a religion.
I’ve always enjoyed reading literature and philosophy, and talking about big ideas. And as I continued to do this after I’d start training jiu jitsu, something happened. I found myself thinking about these ideas in the context of jiu jitsu. I found that so often a particular aspect of jiu jitsu can be used as a clarifying metaphor for some philosophical idea - how when thinking about some obscure philosophical concept I've thought to myself "it's just like in jiu jitsu, when ..." Or when trying to understand some particular aspect of jiu jitsu or jiu jitsu culture, it’s helped me not to rely solely on the reflections of people in the sport itself, but also to turn to thinkers and philosophers who had profound things to say about conflict, hierarchy, social relations, struggle and death. These are maybe the musings of an obsessive, but in any and all of the articles that follow I'm going to try and outline exactly what I mean. Clearly some of the insights will have cross-over to other sports, especially other martial arts. But they say write about what you love and write about what you know, so here I am writing about jiu jitsu and about philosophy.