I found this to be an interesting read. Thought I'd share.
Patterning Chaos
Learn the pattern, practice the pattern, integrate the pattern, become the pattern, discard the pattern. If you don’t, you risk failure when Chaos comes.
CR Williams
The Fight.
Havoc. Confusion. Distraction. The Fog of your very own, intensely personal WAR. SHTF. Pain and fear and anger. Adrenaline dumping to the bloodstream. Tunnel vision and auditory exclusion and tricks on your perception and thinking and memory. All of that and it feels like more.
Chaos, let’s call it. Entropy focused in time and space, entropy squared where you’re at and when you’re there. The three laws of thermodynamics rolling into a point and hitting you square in the head and heart, driving into your world at a time and place of the bad guy’s choosing and, as much as he can make it, under his control.
Your mission if that happens, whether you want to accept it or not, is to manage that sudden Chaos enough to be the one that goes home when the fight is over and your life has returned to its normal and invisibly-entropic state. Your mission is to not just survive, but to regain and impose order through the Chaos, enough order so that the bad guy’s plan suffers its own sudden and unexpected entropic onset and collapses on him.
Put more plainly, you want to win the fight you didn’t know was coming and you want to win it decisively.
How do you do that? By planning and preparation and practice and training. Everybody knows that.
Everybody also knows that the fight is fluid, the fight is chaotic, and you can’t predict when the fight will come or how the fight will develop and happen. You won’t know where, you won’t know when, you won’t know who, you won’t know how many, you won’t know…
By definition, you can’t really expect the unexpected. That’s why it’s called ‘the unexpected’ in the first place, right?
So how do you prepare for something you won’t know about?
Here is a paradox of preparing for the fight: To be able to handle Chaos, you have to learn about Order. To deal with what is fluid, you must first build a foundation of and on that which is solid.
You have to learn the Patterns. You simply will not fight as well without them as you will if you have learned them well enough to discard them. And that is another paradox of the fight: To have the best chance of winning decisively, you must yourself fight without a pattern, and you can’t do that without first learning what those patterns are.
If Combat Is Chaos, though, why do we have to learn Patterns? Why can’t we learn a bunch of techniques (some of which are themselves Patterns, mind you) and then apply them ‘on the fly’ as needed?
Patterns teach us concepts and principles that stretch over, organize, and direct us and the techniques we learn. Roger Phillips’ ‘Drawstroke Continuum’ for example. The pattern we learn is the drawstroke to a range of places, planes, orientations, and directions. The concepts and principles we learn include such things as driving the gun to the target, extending the gun only as far as is safe (from a snatch attempt), and staying under the master eye or visual center throughout. Even learning a basic to-the-front X-count drawstroke, you learn those things sometimes without knowing you are learning those things. All I remember doing before my first PSP course was a normal drawstroke, but once Roger had explained things and we started running, it became a crude but serviceable multi-directional, multi-level, multi-range variable draw that accommodated itself to whatever direction Roger had us running to. I didn’t learn a different drawstroke for each specific direction, I learned the Pattern well enough to get the Principles and Concepts integrated and then dropped it (keeping the Principles and Concepts) when it didn’t go to exactly the direction and level I needed to go to. You can, and will, do the same if you will only apply yourself to that kind of focused training.
This Pattern learned...
*
...provides the concepts and principles that allow you to discard it on demand:
*
Patterns give us automatic responses that start us acting while we’re still surprised. There is a saying about finding yourself in a survival situation that goes something like: “Do SOMETHING even if it’s wrong!” The idea is to start yourself moving and acting in order to keep yourself from stopping either because you panic and freeze or because you over-think the situation and hesitate to do anything that’s not near-perfect. The same principle can apply to the much smaller time-scales involved in a fight for life. Patterns integrated and made automatic can get us moving when the tendency might be to stop until our mind processes the input of the attack. The repetitive practice of the pattern gives our subconscious, the ‘monkey brain’ that takes over in those moments, a familiar thing. You know what to do without being conscious of it, and as you’re getting caught up consciously, you’re taking action, even if it’s not perfect. That gives you a chance to get ‘on course’ while it throws off the attacker’s planning about how things will go. You catch up, you get ahead, you win. Without learning the pattern, the risk is increased that you freeze while you’re assessing things. You fall further behind and you lose. Better to have the ‘automatic’ built in somewhere.
The Patterns we learn are sometimes all we need to Win. There are many cases where just the first move, or the setup for the first move, whether that’s drawing the weapon but not using it to the first automatic block/deflection/evasion and counterstrike, will change the attacker’s mind about continuing. Starting the pattern you have learned and made automatic starts your mind and spirit on their way to ‘fighting’ mode as well. The physical reflects on the mental which alters the physical again, and on and on. By assuming the ‘attitude’ that a particular Pattern forces on you, you may tell the attacker that you’re more of a risk than others and make them decide to break away. You go home unharmed. That’s a Win.
Patterns are the basis of the improvisation that we need in the fight. There are a limited number of chords and notes in music, but look at the music that is generated from that. There are only three primary colors that, mixed together various ways, produce all the hues and tones we see and use. The human body only moves in certain ways over certain ranges, and the most efficient ways to move are limited, but that has not limited the sports and the martial arts that have been developed to use those movements over those ranges. The patterns we learn in the beginning are what we will use in the near-continuous adaptation to the specific threat and the specific fight we may or will face—and I can all but guarantee that we will have to adapt, to modify and add and subtract from and combine those basic patterns to meet the demands of the moment. Broad similarities? Surely so. But even fighting the same opponent in the same place, something is always different, something will always demand at least some variation and adaptation to the demands of the instant. If it happens in controlled environments—the ring, the Octagon, the dojo—how much more likely is it to happen in the parking lot at 8pm?
Patterns, then, are important, and not just something to grit your teeth and bear until the instructor gets to the really neat stuff. Because…and trust me on this one…you won’t do the really neat stuff nearly as well unless you’ve given more than a cursory nod and some lip service to the fundamental concepts and principles that Patterns teach you. And unless you can do the fundamentals and the basics well and almost forgetfully when you’re on the range shooting straight up and straight ahead, you risk not being able to do them in the drugstore parking lot at 8:30 in the evening when you’re caught between two cars and the guy on your left with the big knife.
Musashi might have put it this way: Study the Way, make the Way part of you, become the Way, forget the Way and be what you really were in the beginning. I say it this way: Learn the Patterns, integrate the Patterns, make the Patterns natural, forget the Patterns, and so become more comfortable in Chaos. Either way you put it, if you do this—and it doesn’t take as much effort and time as you may think to—you will still end up being able to defend yourself and destroy your enemies far better and more quickly than you could before.
And that’s the bottom line to all of this, isn’t it?
Be safe out there. And if you can’t be safe, be dangerous.
*
Patterning Chaos
Learn the pattern, practice the pattern, integrate the pattern, become the pattern, discard the pattern. If you don’t, you risk failure when Chaos comes.
CR Williams
The Fight.
Havoc. Confusion. Distraction. The Fog of your very own, intensely personal WAR. SHTF. Pain and fear and anger. Adrenaline dumping to the bloodstream. Tunnel vision and auditory exclusion and tricks on your perception and thinking and memory. All of that and it feels like more.
Chaos, let’s call it. Entropy focused in time and space, entropy squared where you’re at and when you’re there. The three laws of thermodynamics rolling into a point and hitting you square in the head and heart, driving into your world at a time and place of the bad guy’s choosing and, as much as he can make it, under his control.
Your mission if that happens, whether you want to accept it or not, is to manage that sudden Chaos enough to be the one that goes home when the fight is over and your life has returned to its normal and invisibly-entropic state. Your mission is to not just survive, but to regain and impose order through the Chaos, enough order so that the bad guy’s plan suffers its own sudden and unexpected entropic onset and collapses on him.
Put more plainly, you want to win the fight you didn’t know was coming and you want to win it decisively.
How do you do that? By planning and preparation and practice and training. Everybody knows that.
Everybody also knows that the fight is fluid, the fight is chaotic, and you can’t predict when the fight will come or how the fight will develop and happen. You won’t know where, you won’t know when, you won’t know who, you won’t know how many, you won’t know…
By definition, you can’t really expect the unexpected. That’s why it’s called ‘the unexpected’ in the first place, right?
So how do you prepare for something you won’t know about?
Here is a paradox of preparing for the fight: To be able to handle Chaos, you have to learn about Order. To deal with what is fluid, you must first build a foundation of and on that which is solid.
You have to learn the Patterns. You simply will not fight as well without them as you will if you have learned them well enough to discard them. And that is another paradox of the fight: To have the best chance of winning decisively, you must yourself fight without a pattern, and you can’t do that without first learning what those patterns are.
If Combat Is Chaos, though, why do we have to learn Patterns? Why can’t we learn a bunch of techniques (some of which are themselves Patterns, mind you) and then apply them ‘on the fly’ as needed?
Patterns teach us concepts and principles that stretch over, organize, and direct us and the techniques we learn. Roger Phillips’ ‘Drawstroke Continuum’ for example. The pattern we learn is the drawstroke to a range of places, planes, orientations, and directions. The concepts and principles we learn include such things as driving the gun to the target, extending the gun only as far as is safe (from a snatch attempt), and staying under the master eye or visual center throughout. Even learning a basic to-the-front X-count drawstroke, you learn those things sometimes without knowing you are learning those things. All I remember doing before my first PSP course was a normal drawstroke, but once Roger had explained things and we started running, it became a crude but serviceable multi-directional, multi-level, multi-range variable draw that accommodated itself to whatever direction Roger had us running to. I didn’t learn a different drawstroke for each specific direction, I learned the Pattern well enough to get the Principles and Concepts integrated and then dropped it (keeping the Principles and Concepts) when it didn’t go to exactly the direction and level I needed to go to. You can, and will, do the same if you will only apply yourself to that kind of focused training.
This Pattern learned...
*
...provides the concepts and principles that allow you to discard it on demand:
*
Patterns give us automatic responses that start us acting while we’re still surprised. There is a saying about finding yourself in a survival situation that goes something like: “Do SOMETHING even if it’s wrong!” The idea is to start yourself moving and acting in order to keep yourself from stopping either because you panic and freeze or because you over-think the situation and hesitate to do anything that’s not near-perfect. The same principle can apply to the much smaller time-scales involved in a fight for life. Patterns integrated and made automatic can get us moving when the tendency might be to stop until our mind processes the input of the attack. The repetitive practice of the pattern gives our subconscious, the ‘monkey brain’ that takes over in those moments, a familiar thing. You know what to do without being conscious of it, and as you’re getting caught up consciously, you’re taking action, even if it’s not perfect. That gives you a chance to get ‘on course’ while it throws off the attacker’s planning about how things will go. You catch up, you get ahead, you win. Without learning the pattern, the risk is increased that you freeze while you’re assessing things. You fall further behind and you lose. Better to have the ‘automatic’ built in somewhere.
The Patterns we learn are sometimes all we need to Win. There are many cases where just the first move, or the setup for the first move, whether that’s drawing the weapon but not using it to the first automatic block/deflection/evasion and counterstrike, will change the attacker’s mind about continuing. Starting the pattern you have learned and made automatic starts your mind and spirit on their way to ‘fighting’ mode as well. The physical reflects on the mental which alters the physical again, and on and on. By assuming the ‘attitude’ that a particular Pattern forces on you, you may tell the attacker that you’re more of a risk than others and make them decide to break away. You go home unharmed. That’s a Win.
Patterns are the basis of the improvisation that we need in the fight. There are a limited number of chords and notes in music, but look at the music that is generated from that. There are only three primary colors that, mixed together various ways, produce all the hues and tones we see and use. The human body only moves in certain ways over certain ranges, and the most efficient ways to move are limited, but that has not limited the sports and the martial arts that have been developed to use those movements over those ranges. The patterns we learn in the beginning are what we will use in the near-continuous adaptation to the specific threat and the specific fight we may or will face—and I can all but guarantee that we will have to adapt, to modify and add and subtract from and combine those basic patterns to meet the demands of the moment. Broad similarities? Surely so. But even fighting the same opponent in the same place, something is always different, something will always demand at least some variation and adaptation to the demands of the instant. If it happens in controlled environments—the ring, the Octagon, the dojo—how much more likely is it to happen in the parking lot at 8pm?
Patterns, then, are important, and not just something to grit your teeth and bear until the instructor gets to the really neat stuff. Because…and trust me on this one…you won’t do the really neat stuff nearly as well unless you’ve given more than a cursory nod and some lip service to the fundamental concepts and principles that Patterns teach you. And unless you can do the fundamentals and the basics well and almost forgetfully when you’re on the range shooting straight up and straight ahead, you risk not being able to do them in the drugstore parking lot at 8:30 in the evening when you’re caught between two cars and the guy on your left with the big knife.
Musashi might have put it this way: Study the Way, make the Way part of you, become the Way, forget the Way and be what you really were in the beginning. I say it this way: Learn the Patterns, integrate the Patterns, make the Patterns natural, forget the Patterns, and so become more comfortable in Chaos. Either way you put it, if you do this—and it doesn’t take as much effort and time as you may think to—you will still end up being able to defend yourself and destroy your enemies far better and more quickly than you could before.
And that’s the bottom line to all of this, isn’t it?
Be safe out there. And if you can’t be safe, be dangerous.
*
