No Other Feeling
Jiu Jitsu Con, Pt. 1
There’s no other feeling like being in the bullpen. You’re warmed up, you’re sweaty, and you’re nervous. There are other competitors pacing around you—some are casually talking to their team, others have their hands buried in their faces, and still others, like you, are waiting for their fate. Whatever it is, you will be facing it.
This is the feeling that I’ve gotten again and again. I just competed, and I just lost, yesterday. While I don’t usually write essays like this “live” in the moment (I compete again today), I have decided that it’s important to capture my feelings in the moment, as they arise.
Yesterday I lost my match by submission. I didn’t even make it to the halfway mark.
It’s disappointing in so many ways but the biggest disappointment was that it happened. I can’t do anything about it now to change the way it did. I still feel the overwhelming sadness wash over me—a feeling that I had long tried to suppress in other contexts—again and again and again as I laid in my soft hotel bed, tossing and turning. Finally a resignation, an acceptance, to let myself feel whatever was happening allowed me to fall asleep. I was exhausted, anyways.
When I took a shower yesterday, I noticed that I had fingerprint bruises on my forearm where my opponent had been gripping me. It was at that moment that I was reminded of how physically combative this sport of jiu jitsu is. In just a short two and a half minutes, I managed to get bruises in a body presumably hardened by weight training, judo and jiu jitsu, through a gi several layers thick. It showed me what I had been really facing and up against. Thousands of miles away in Las Vegas, in a desolate part of the mountains, in a shower at a two-star (but somehow nice) hotel, it began to hit home the magnitude of what I had experienced, and what I will experience again and again.
To some this feeling will be insignificant, but this is a significant event for me. I’d like to think that every experience I had will have significance and meaning, at least in my own personal universe. It is these events that are so small and yet so cataclysmic that I also feel compelled to share, because if I kept them to myself, I think I would implode.
Margaret Wheatley writes, “The shape of chaos materializes from information feeding back on itself and changing in the process.” Information can take many forms but lately it’s been taking the form of feelings. Feelings as I book a flight thousands of miles away and request vacation time that inevitably comes at the wrong times; feelings taking a ride through an unfamiliar landscape; feelings as I watch the sun come over the mountains and a ferris wheel while pigeons walk beside me. Feelings as I feel the roaring, sonic booms of thousands of people as I enter the stadium; feelings of having not one, but two, Olympic judo medalists put arms around my shoulders for a picture; feelings at watching my name move up closer and closer to the top of the board.
There will be so many feelings to experience in jiu jitsu, and by extension, life.
After all, there’s no other feeling like feeling alive.