I read this recently on Rory Miller’s blog:

Most people train to bolster their fantasy life far more than they train for survival.

He’s talking about martial arts and real-world violence; Sgt. Miller has a very strong opinion about the way most martial arts are taught nowadays. I suppose he has a pretty unimpeachable perspective, being involved on a daily basis in putting down tough criminals.

But I wonder about the rest of us. I wonder deeply. Right now I’m sitting in a restaurant waiting for my dinner. Other than my year in the woods I have had so little direct contact with the sources of the food that had to die for me to live. Other than my few brushes with schoolyard violence, I haven’t had much contact with violence; I don’t have to bust heads or nuts on a daily basis either to survive or to make a living. I’ve taken classes in martial arts from people who tout valid lineages, most of whom also haven’t had backgrounds of street violence or military training or police experience. These instructors might be among those that Sgt. Miller would criticize. Unless you’ve actually been there and done that, or are expecting to, or been trained by someone who has, then you’re trying to match your life and your training to a figment of imagination — yours or someone else’s.

But here’s the thing. Aiming at a figment of imagination seems to describe my whole life. After all, I went to live in the woods, why? Because it was necessary to survive, physically? Absolutely not. I went for the fantasy. I took martial arts for the fantasy. But I also went to college for the fantasy. I became an acupuncturist for the fantasy. None of it was directly relevant to my immediate physical circumstances. But this applies to so many things. Will Smith’s movie The Pursuit of Happyness was about what else but a fantasy? But one made real. In many ways, you have to dream your life, before it can actually arrive into existence.

So what’s the problem with that? Well, I kind of laid it out in my critique of my year in the woods. To sum up, when things get hard, it creates a psychic split where part of you holds to the fantasy, at least provisionally, in order to try to actualize it; and another part of you wants to give up the fantasy as not actually real, and accept the cold, hard reality that’s right in front of you, because that’s where your power is: in the present.

Fantasy is about projecting yourself into a situation that’s other than who or where you are, because it offers something that the present moment does not. When you think about what to have for dinner you’re fantasizing. When you think about what career you want to go into, you’re fantasizing. It’s not healthy or unhealthy, it’s what we do. It can get healthy or unhealthy depending on how much you live in your fantasies proportional to what you do about those fantasies.

Ultimately I think it should be about having a useful fantasy that leads to a useful reality. Sgt. Miller’s critique is valid insofar as he’s talking about people’s martial art fantasies obscuring hard truths. Train for a fight the wrong way, or train for the wrong kind of fight, and you’re injured or dead.

Likewise, people trying to live primitively in the woods will quickly learn that it’s not all peace pipe, Native American songs, and laughing around the campfire, or whatever the fantasy is. It’s hard work, sweat, and tears. Alongside the good stuff, of course.

But which fantasy do you choose?

It seems to me that you can never know which is the right fantasy. Sgt. Miller, in that blog post, talks about how people don’t really train to things that could really happen, but they train for fantasy.

The people who need [self-defense skills], the ones most likely to be victimized are the timid, the unathletic, the unaware… exactly the group least likely to seek out training.

“I’m good enough for what I’m likely to run into,” he said, “I don’t need to train for your environment.”

It’s not true and it is terrifyingly blind… yet it is true. He is likely to run into exactly nothing in his life. He is adequately prepared for that. But violence comes in something closer to a hockey stick distribution than a bell curve. It probably won’t hit this kid. But if it does he will likely need skills and ferocity well beyond what I’ve needed.

But this leads to a strange expansion: If your current dreams and ideas about reality trap you into tunnel vision, then you have to find other fantasies. But how can you find them all? Because once you start looking, you get so many. You could get shot by a sniper. Your home could be invaded by men with guns. You could be walking your dog and get kidnapped. You could be poisoned. You could be blackmailed. Really, you can’t possibly train for all of these things. What roots you, then?

Fantasies come in several varieties. You’re either running towards something, or you’re running away from something. And, you can be running towards or away from an identity (as in, “I want to be a comedian,” or, “I never want to be like my father”), or you can be running towards or away from an experience (“I want to travel the world” vs. “I’ll never be raped again”).

Because of the way this is set up, most people let previous experiences or future expectations root them. Either they came from a hard situation, or they’re about to go into one, that’s why they know how to fight. That sounds pretty reasonable. Sgt. Miller says that if you didn’t come from a hard situation or are about to go into one, and therefore you don’t give a shit about defending yourself … then you’re shit out of luck! Damn. I mean, what can you do about that? Really it can get to a point where you’re worried about everything.

Here’s another example. Take the whole collapse-of-civilization thing. There are lots of people out there that believe our civilization is in decline. They vary as to the story. Some say it’ll bust all of a sudden, and within a few years. Others say it’ll take a long time of ups and downs. Still others don’t even believe we’ve peaked.

What you choose to do with your life depends on which story you hold to. Some people are busting ass out in the woods already. On the other end, some people are still expecting the eternal bull market to return eventually. But who’s right? I’m a bit sympathetic to the doomers, but they were around just before the whole Y2K thing too, and look how that one turned out. In a general sense, you could go round and round convincing yourself of so many different possible realities, and still be wrong, still be blindsided. You can just drive yourself nuts trying to figure it all out.

How do you choose which fantasy to follow? Because Sgt. Miller is wrong, too. Those people who don’t follow a “useful” fantasy … well, do they necessarily live useless lives? There’s something about a little bit of madness that’s kind of divine, whether it’s Arctic explorers or comic book artists, people who aren’t content to survive life by living the way things are “set up” to live, but have to follow the beat of their own drum even if it leads off a cliff. And sometimes it does, but sometimes they take off into greatness. We hear about people doing crazy stuff and living life and maybe sometimes dying from doing really stupid things — and other times surviving to just have an awesome story to tell. If you always go for what’s realistic, how do you know when your longshot fantasies might actually come true?

Plenty of arguments on both sides. I don’t really know either way. I’m just sayin’ that the hard-nosed Mr. Miller has a definite point, that doesn’t always hold up. And when applied to life in general, I’m inclined to go his direction, which is the same direction that my parents and society and most other people say is the safe one and the right one, and certainly when applied to violence and life-or-death situations you gotta be nothing less than harshly realistic.

… But then there’s a faint fae light beckoning yonder …