Everybody was kung fu fighting
Article 4/365 of Jacques’s Writing Quest
Everybody was Kung Fu fighting.
Those cats were fast as lightning.
In fact, it was a little bit frightening.
But they fought with expert timing.
I love this song by Carl Douglas. Listen to it here. It’s certain to uplift your spirits.
I practised Kung Fu in the early nineties and entered a couple of sparring tournaments. I loved Kung Fu. The discipline and focus of it all. It’s an elegant style of fighting and something beautiful to watch.
I remember when I used to fight in competitions. The fighting started beautifully. It was an elegant and eloquent work of art encased in a tapestry of fluid movement and effortless flow.
The fighting was intense and tiring (3 x 3-minute rounds). As the fighting progressed, and the contestants got tired and hurt, it started to lose its shape. Near the end, elegance and eloquence flew out the window. It became nothing more than a common bar-room brawl. Head down, swinging wildly, hoping to hit something.
When “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” (Robert Burns), we go to our default programming.
I strive to live my life in flow – elegantly and eloquently. It has become apparent to me that I have a lot of work to do on that front. Sometimes, when I face difficulties, I tend to forget my good intentions and instead fall back on blaming and complaining.
This default setting puts me straight into victim mode. The programmers were good and coded me with shame, apathy, guilt, fear and anger. Maybe they did that to you too? Victimhood is not a path that is helpful. We can all get off that path and programme another one that is more helpful.
After all, as Carlos Castaneda said, “A path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you.”
We can programme a better path for ourselves, one where mastery and not victimhood becomes our default setting.
The keystrokes of courage, awe, gratitude, love, joy and peace will help us on the way to our highest aspiration: Enlightenment.
Let’s do that, you and I. Let’s play this game elegantly and eloquently. That’s a better way to live, don’t you think?