In college I took hapkido and tai chi. Even a little bit of push hands. It's been years since I've done any of it, but some of the lessons stuck with me still.
Push hands is a little bit like an old childhood game. The one where you put your front foot next to someone else's foot, grab each other by the hand and try to unbalance the other person. Except, of course, the stances and point of contact are different.
As for lessons learned - first of all, when you're in contact with the other person you can kind of sense where their balance is. Where they're moving to, and from. (In the military sense - when you're in contact with the enemy you have a sense of where they're moving to. It's when you lose all contact that they become unpredictable.)
Second - in push hands, once someone loses balance the other person has control. If your opponent loses their balance, you control where they go. In order to win, you need to keep your balance while making them lose theirs. If they're moving towards you, maybe you should go with it...even aid them in that movement. Make them overextend. Then they lose their balance, and you can direct them easily.
So many people think battle is straightforward. Attack. Block. Swing, block, swing. A fight like that can easily become about brute strength, stamina, and speed. It's comparatively simple...and makes you forget that there are other options. Instead of blocking, just give them a little assist. As they move farther and faster than they intended, they overextend and lose their balance. Meeting strength with weakness can do the same thing. (This is all situationally dependent, of course.)
So Vietnam, for example, could be seen as an overextension by the United States. We lost our balance. Funny enough, though, the Soviet Union then overextended in Afghanistan.
I brought this up for two reasons. First because we all too often get locked into an 'attack/block' mentality. It's important to remember that there are other options.
The second reason? We have to know when we're overextending.
On a side note - when reading about the spy games during the Cold War it seemed that the Soviet Union regularly kicked our butts. This may be a misleading impression, since I'm sure there are some things still classified...but the Soviets generally seemed to do better at building their spy networks. Yet they're the ones that fell apart in the 80's...so apparently winning the spy game wasn't as critical as you'd think.
I'm part of that curious generation just old enough to remember the Cold War without being forged in it...and young enough to adapt to the internet and all the new technology that came out since then. The logic of the Cold War was very black and white. And during that time, we misread situations time and time again. Focused more on communism, for example, and overlooked nationalism. I believe our misreading the situation caused a lot of damage to our own national security.
In the last decade or so terrorism has become the new thing...and I see some of the same mentalities. Black vs. White. Oversimplification of the issues. When you see situations through that lens, you are just as likely to misread the situation and propose strategies that backfire.
This bothers me. I think I hate terrorists as much as anyone, and I don't want them to succeed. Yet I find, time and again, that the people who ought to be allies seem blindly determined to think in terms of attack/block...to the point where they actually make it harder to fight terrorism.
Push hands is a little bit like an old childhood game. The one where you put your front foot next to someone else's foot, grab each other by the hand and try to unbalance the other person. Except, of course, the stances and point of contact are different.
As for lessons learned - first of all, when you're in contact with the other person you can kind of sense where their balance is. Where they're moving to, and from. (In the military sense - when you're in contact with the enemy you have a sense of where they're moving to. It's when you lose all contact that they become unpredictable.)
Second - in push hands, once someone loses balance the other person has control. If your opponent loses their balance, you control where they go. In order to win, you need to keep your balance while making them lose theirs. If they're moving towards you, maybe you should go with it...even aid them in that movement. Make them overextend. Then they lose their balance, and you can direct them easily.
So many people think battle is straightforward. Attack. Block. Swing, block, swing. A fight like that can easily become about brute strength, stamina, and speed. It's comparatively simple...and makes you forget that there are other options. Instead of blocking, just give them a little assist. As they move farther and faster than they intended, they overextend and lose their balance. Meeting strength with weakness can do the same thing. (This is all situationally dependent, of course.)
So Vietnam, for example, could be seen as an overextension by the United States. We lost our balance. Funny enough, though, the Soviet Union then overextended in Afghanistan.
I brought this up for two reasons. First because we all too often get locked into an 'attack/block' mentality. It's important to remember that there are other options.
The second reason? We have to know when we're overextending.
On a side note - when reading about the spy games during the Cold War it seemed that the Soviet Union regularly kicked our butts. This may be a misleading impression, since I'm sure there are some things still classified...but the Soviets generally seemed to do better at building their spy networks. Yet they're the ones that fell apart in the 80's...so apparently winning the spy game wasn't as critical as you'd think.
I'm part of that curious generation just old enough to remember the Cold War without being forged in it...and young enough to adapt to the internet and all the new technology that came out since then. The logic of the Cold War was very black and white. And during that time, we misread situations time and time again. Focused more on communism, for example, and overlooked nationalism. I believe our misreading the situation caused a lot of damage to our own national security.
In the last decade or so terrorism has become the new thing...and I see some of the same mentalities. Black vs. White. Oversimplification of the issues. When you see situations through that lens, you are just as likely to misread the situation and propose strategies that backfire.
This bothers me. I think I hate terrorists as much as anyone, and I don't want them to succeed. Yet I find, time and again, that the people who ought to be allies seem blindly determined to think in terms of attack/block...to the point where they actually make it harder to fight terrorism.
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