BasselsJ’s message for families and students.Dear families and students,
I would like to embrace the ending of a most unique 2 years, and the beginning of another, with an explanation of two very misunderstood words when put together: martial and art, and the underlying value I have come to see in the study and teaching of this discipline as an artist of it.
We are all unfolding beautiful compositions of art made through each other, hosted by a gallery that we can’t see for no other reason than it is far too familiar in each of us. Martial arts is an art where we refine our relationship with what we initially acknowledge as most familiar—fighting.
What we study as a martial artist cannot be initially accomplished individually in the same way the elementary foundations of many subjects we learn in school can. We can learn the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic as an individual, but learning about the foundations of our behaviour and how to govern it is something we learn through each other.
Unique to this subject is that it is defined by the search for a question to something we already know and recognize even as children—fighting and conflict-something most evident in our stories, video games, TV shows, movies and competition, not because the interests of a child defines them any more than it defines an adult, but because it is so much a part of the world we create that we don’t see it at first.
We all have taught each other something about our human nature through this 24-month worldwide sparring match… We have all been students of fighting.
Martial arts is founded on the acquaintance with our nature through another and theirs through us, that we make each other. War, battle and weapons do not exist in an individual, they are created and made by us through which the summit of this deep and vast discipline is achieved through the refinement of these things we make, not as the purpose for why we studying it, but so we can better understand the source of it in our selves.
This pandemic has been a struggle, more for some than others. It has been a martial arts lesson in humility, compassion and service of something greater than our own selves, our beliefs and sometimes a very misunderstood word, freedom.
Regardless of whether you believe the threat to be real or not, or the government to be truthful or the vaccine to be safe, we all have taught each other something about our human nature through this 24-month (and counting) worldwide sparring match. We have become better acquainted with something we may not like or admire in another, as well as something we do, a higher perspective that allows us to recognize something similar in ourselves. We have all learned something from the shades of fighting that comes from our nature. We have all been students of fighting.
In spirit,
BasselsJ
Head Director
CMAC Dapo