I think I’ll have to admit that my relationship with martial arts will always wax and wane: I just started taking Shaolin kung fu again.

Of course, the same issues that drove me to quit kung fu before are still lurking. I suppose this time I have a little more insight and therefore am a little more honest about what I’m doing.

One thing that continues to be invaluable about this particular kung fu tradition is its effective teaching of qigong and building of energy, providing concrete experiences of qi that are then used and built upon. As I’ve said before, the qigong, particularly the stance training, has been the single most helpful activity to boost my physical energy. And since I’m finishing school and likely moving away in just over a year, I thought this was a good time to put in a little more time in another qi-building endeavor.

But of course, kung fu is still training for violence. And what of that?

Let me back up first to explain why I started it up again. Lately I’ve been finding that the more energy I build, the more I have to use. Conveniently enough, over the past couple of years, my school responsibilities have steadily increased, roughly on par with my energy gain. But still, sometimes I could have more energy. In fact, I feel that I could build a lot more energy, if I wanted to.

But I’ve hit a ceiling, and it’s got nothing to do with how much energy I’m physically capable of handling. It has something to do with where to put it. Think of it this way: Say I’m crippled for some reason, my legs are atrophied or something, so my arms have to do a lot of work to keep me upright (pushing on crutches, etc.). But once I start healing, once I’ve got my legs steady under me, my arms don’t really have to help pull me up anymore. They’re freed to do something else. But what if they’ve forgotten what else is possible?

I feel like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, with the powerful legs and the useless little arms.

What’s to occupy me now?

One theme that I’ve returned to is the role of story in one’s life and identity, and of course a sense of story is exactly what I’m searching for now. For every activity one engages in, there’s a story that sustains one in it. Martial arts is a case in point. There are of course many martial artists who train because it’s part of their job, whether they’re in the armed forces or cops or security guards; in that case, they are in the midst of living their particular story and it would make no sense for them not to train. But there are lots of other people who have no use for martial arts in a direct, practical sense, yet they train passionately, for their own purposes. And they must have other purposes, if they’re just a computer programmer or an advertising executive.

My theory is that people engage in such activities as much because they’re looking for a good story to participate in as anything else. Of course such benefits as health, self-defense, and self-confidence accrue. But there’s a depth of story to ancient martial traditions that blow cardio-kickboxing out of the water. There’s a grandeur to being part of a long tradition — and lineage is a big deal with a lot of serious martial artists. Of course, some unscrupulous people take advantage of that, which is why you see so many claims of “ancient lineages” and “secrets of the masters” thrown around in martial arts circles. Because everyone secretly does want to be that guy in the story who meets the old master and learns to be an unstoppable warrior.

So my own struggle with staying in martial arts had less to do with physical capability than with struggling to find a story that fit, a reason to do what I was doing. My body enjoyed some of what I was doing, and that’s why I was there in the first place. My mind didn’t enjoy some of what I was doing. Sometimes the body spoke louder, sometimes the mind. When the body was particularly weak, that made it easier for the mind to have its way. Lately the body has gotten stronger, which has propelled me back into class.

I’d prefer that it not continue like this, though, with two separate motivations at cross purposes. I originally got into this particular martial art with the intention of allowing myself permission to withdraw when I felt like it — i.e. when the body was weak and the mind prevailed — but ultimately that doesn’t solve the root problem, which is that I tell myself conflicting stories. What I really need is a unifying story. And really, that’s less about martial arts, and more about identity.

So, how about a ninja metaphor (who couldn’t use a ninja metaphor?): Imagine that you were born into a ninja clan that lived in a village, and you’ve trained all your life to learn how to protect yourself and your people through various means. Then one day you’re sent to the nearby castle to spy for information, because you think they might be getting ready to attack you, and you insinuate yourself among the servants. You have to do a lot of things that other servants do, otherwise you’d draw attention to yourself, but you still have this one mission, and that’s what you’re doing.

The mission is one’s story, one’s purpose or identity or goal. Tellingly, in my metaphor the mission is rooted in home, land, and family. The skills (whether martial arts, espionage, or dishwashing) are both absolutely necessary to the mission and absolutely peripheral to the actual goal.

In my pursuit of many things, whether martial arts or primitive skills or other things, I’ve often pursued them with only a vague sense of mission and a sense that pursuing the skills would lead me closer to the goal. In some ways that’s correct; you have to walk before you can run. But where are you running to, and why? Why learn martial arts? Why learn primitive skills? What story do they fit into?

Another example: I wrote last year about how I hate nature, and I still feel that way. That’s because a lot of the experiences I’ve had of nature, and the stories that grew out of those experiences, have had negative consequences. The stories I’ve told myself to sustain me, the “wilderness warrior” identity I attempted to adopt in order to survive my year in the woods, ended up doing me violence. They did so because they did not take into account who I actually was, and so once again competing stories created internal conflict that sapped my energy and created unpleasant experiences. I didn’t have a good story that took everything I was into account and gave me a good direction.

This, of course, has been the source of tremendous confusion and exploration for me, and was the reason why I’ve since spent so much energy exploring and deconstructing my relationship with primitivism. Primitivism provided a useful story for me, and still does to some degree, but it failed at giving me a single, unifying story for all that I am.

Here I am, then. Desperately in need of story.

This does a good job of explaining a lot of what I do with my free time, which is looking for stories. I browse the web, reading news, blogs, cartoons, items of interests. I read novels. I explore diverse nonfiction (right now there’s a book about identity theft and a book about the Mayan calendar on my desk). I’m looking for good stories to fill my life because there’s a void of story in my life.

I know that stories are out there. I do have a little experience animal tracking, not much but enough to know that in every track, no matter how faint, there is some sort of story being told. My experience in Chinese diagnosis tells me there’s a story to be read in everyone’s pulse, face, and tongue. Martial arts teaches me there’s a story to be told in the way your opponent stands and looks at you. There’s no shortage of stories. Probably I could find a story in the reason there are all these hickory nuts outside this year but not last year. For some reason, I block those stories out, though.

So here’s a distinction to be made: I need a grand story, or a Myth — a larger, overarching role/identity/direction — that incorporates and encourages the expression and exploration and integration of smaller stories. Currently the Myth I’m living is excellent in some regards, but the key point I’m trying to drive home today is that it severely neglects, conflicts with, or represses the aspects of life that are outwardly oriented, having to do with things like the physical body or the natural world. Those stories are deliberately ignored within the Myth that I’m living.

Why?

One reason for this is that these stories are composed of languages that are new and unfamiliar to me.

Written English is what I grew up with. I was a precocious reader, and a voracious one. Literacy has been my source of story and identity for a long time. Whatever activity I explore, I accompany it by reading a book about it. And there’s no shortage of books about spirituality, magic, primitive skills, tracking, fighting.

But maybe I’m too locked into English. This is human language, after all, and seeking stories in human language keeps me trapped in the human world, keeps me in a hall of mirrors where I’m just trying to find another human who has come up with a story for me. It keeps me blocked off from other sources of story.

This is the dilemma, though: that, having been locked into human language for so long, I’m illiterate in other forms. I can’t read the language of the birds or animal tracks or plant growth. I can’t read the clouds or the wind or the seasons. And, being unable to read them, they aren’t meaningful to me in a direct way.

So I end up relying on other people’s descriptions. When I read Tom Brown, Jr.’s The Tracker, like many other people, I was captivated by the stories he could tell about nature. When I took his Standard class, one morning, simply in passing, he told a story about the tracks he saw that morning, about the raccoons that had rummaged in the garbage and the coyote that had stopped on the ridge and then ran away because he saw someone. What I wanted, above all, was to experience that kind of meaning, to read the world the way I could read a book.

The problem, though, as many a linguist will tell you, is that languages are best learned when you’re young. When you’re older, it takes a lot more effort to become fluent. It’s taken me many hours of practice to begin to be fluent in pulse diagnosis, and it’s at least related to my chosen profession. Certainly there are people who haven’t had the opportunity in childhood but have now developed a passion for tracking and have become very good at it. But I don’t want to have to be passionate about something in order to extract meaning from it. I want that meaning to be easy as me picking up a book. But it’s not, and won’t be without plenty of practice. And practice requires motivation, and motivation requires, well, a reason, a purpose, a Myth.

I need that larger framework, that Myth, within which it is both safe and beneficial to explore and learn about the stories that are around and within me, as well as to organize those stories so that they are not at cross purposes. Would that I could be that mythical ninja, who learned to track and swim and climb trees and fight and disguise himself, but above all he knew what he was doing it all for, and so everything made sense in the world. In our frenetic, schizophrenic, cut-and-paste civilization, it will take that much more effort in blazing my own trail in order to establish that Myth and sense of story.