The Fight
Inside and Out
Everything is a fight. Your blood cells go to war. Your immune system battles viruses. You struggle to get out of bed in the morning. Sometimes, you wonder how you go on.
We feel resistance all the time. The tension that reminds us we’re alive. We push back against what is, not just accepting everything we perceive.
We conflict with ourselves and the world. Rather than go with life, we wrestle with destiny. The friction keeps us from flying too high.
In the neighborhood where I grew up, looking at someone for too long was reason to come to blows. It didn’t take much to justify a scrap.
But even if you aren’t a literal fighter, you constantly take a defensive posture that puts you in fighting mode. Everyone does.
Sometimes we do it to ourselves. We react to self-criticism with self-protection. To keep from beating ourselves up, we rationalize our behavior or circumstances. We’re not as bad as we say we are.
Some people are in fight mode all the time. Even when they are safe, something inside of them tells them to be prepared for battle. They are always tense, anticipating action.
Most are afraid of physical confrontation. If you’re not prepared for the shock of violence, a fight will terrify you. You’ll be overwhelmed by the moment.
In a war with the outside world, there is sensory overload. During an internal fight, your voice simultaneously yells while being muffled. You won’t let yourself get a word in edgewise.
I pick sides straight away in an internal fight. Too often, I’m against myself. I can see everything I’ve done wrong and why I deserve whatever I get. I totally see things from the other guy’s perspective.
But then I still have to defend myself or risk utter annihilation. It’s like being a lawyer for someone who you know is guilty. You’ve still got to provide the best defense possible.
But I can’t bullshit myself. I know what’s true and false.
I know when I’ve sold myself short and when I’m completely lost. I can tell when I don’t have a good argument for why I’m not a total waste of space.
I often lose the fight against my critical self. When I do, I feel physically defeated. It’s as if I’ve gotten beaten up for real. It takes time to recover. I’ve got to lick my wounds.
Eventually, I get up to fight again. But there’s always a sense that things shouldn’t be quite so hard. Everything shouldn’t be a struggle.
Except that’s the nature of everything. Left, right. Up, down. On, off. Good and evil. Depression or mania. Opposites drive the world. The transition from one to the other is where the conflict exists.
So we have to be in conflict if we are moving through life. There’s resistance just before the switch from one thing to the other. Otherwise, there would be no change.
Once you are fully one or the other, there is no more conflict, but this is temporary. The balance is quickly thrown off again, as the other side tries to reassert itself. You can’t be one thing for long. You eventually start to evaporate or dissolve. You become something else.
I’m tired of fighting myself and the world. I want to treat life like a game instead of a war. But the stakes seem too high. I get anxious at all there is to lose.
Why do I treat myself like the enemy? Wouldn’t I have a better chance if I banded together? There’s strength in numbers, yet I split myself in two different directions, weakening myself too much to fight effectively.
It’s not so much that I fight, but that I don’t fight masterfully. If I am being mindful, if I’m fully aware, my resistance will only last for a brief moment. Enough to feel what is causing the disturbance. Once I push back a little, I listen for the answer.
Instead, I brawl too much of the time. I knuckle up and go at it with myself. Rock ‘em, sock ‘em until only one man is standing.
I know how to fight better than that. I know how to use trickery and leverage to defeat an opponent. I don’t have to just swing for the fences and hope for the best.
But mentally, it always feels like I need to do more. I have to work harder, or I’m not proving myself.
My daughter asks why I don’t let our one-year-old cavapoo play with pit bulls. She says I’m discriminating against the dogs because of their bad reputation, rather than judging each pit bull individually.
But pit bulls are fighting dogs. It’s in their blood. Just because a fighter is calm in one moment doesn’t mean he couldn’t explode in the next. Pit bulls are bred to fight.
When fighting is in your nature, nurturing is slow to beat it out of you. You’re prone to aggression. Quick to react.
The aggression won’t be only toward the outside world. When you turn against yourself, your ugliest side comes out. You berate and belittle yourself more than anyone else ever could. The attitude meant to protect you from the outside eats you up on the inside.
Most of us are our own worst enemies. Instead of cheering ourselves on, we heckle. We make things as hard as possible by not being in alignment. We work against ourselves. We fight.
What if we danced instead? If we found a rhythm and took turns leading and being led? We’d move gracefully to the music and find a way to flow together. It would be much less bloody.
I remind myself every day that the fight is mainly in my head. It’s always a rematch, and by now I know exactly what my opponent is going to do.
My book, Internal Jiu Jitsu: Conquering Mind and Body Resistance By Giving Way, is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books.org, or even better, at your local bookstore!.
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