Good afternoon on this beautiful sunny day.
I would like to mention an incident involving one of my students that was recently brought to my attention. I won’t mention this person by name, but I thought that the matter was sufficiently important to be made public.
Last week, when walking home in the evening, this student was confronted by three men. After an initially ‘innocent’ dialogue (a signature of this kind of attack), they proceeded to try to steal the student’s belongings. At this point the attacker proceeded to pull a knife out of his pocket. Reacting instantly, and with one movement, the student both stopped this happening and knocked the attacker unconscious with a single punch. The other two would-be muggers then proceeded to attack the student from behind, but the student was also able to defend himself successfully. When the police later arrived, the initial attacker was taken to hospital with concussion and the others arrested. At this point it was discovered that the attacker was not only carrying a razor knife, but had also just robbed a nearby store.
This student deserves congratulations. Not only was the student able to escape alive (unlike quite a few unfortunate victims of this sort of crime) but also no more than reasonable force was used – which had the additional affect of apprehending a criminal. All in all, a good reflection as to how this student has continued to develop through Chinese Kung Fu. It should be noted that this student is also a young teenager…
Rather than concentrate on the incident itself (a sad reflection on society today), I would like to discuss what this situation teaches us; there are quite a few ‘life lessons’ which can be learnt.
The first lesson is that you never know when you will need your training. I have repeated this many times in class (and the last time only a few weeks ago). If you have the opportunity to train you should take it; you can never get back a missed opportunity. It also tells you to make the most of your time - attending class and seminars is a good start, but only if you can make the best of your time there. Like most of life, you will only ever get out what you put in.
The second is that this kind of power to incapacitate a person with a single punch only comes from hours of hard training. It shows the importance of simple direct movements (as opposed to ‘flashy’, complicated manoeuvres) and the need to ‘write’ these movements into your nervous system so that you can react without thinking. In my opinion, it also shows the importance of only training one style (as opposite to ‘mixing’) to enable your body to determine the correct way to react.
Thirdly, it is sensible to think back over the situation and reflect upon if there were any ways that it could have been avoided. This could perhaps be by reading the situation better or having more awareness of your surroundings. I have, in fact, already discussed this in person with this student. It is also, sadly, an illustration that there are occasions when use of force is unfortunately inevitable. It takes courage to be able to do this; it is often the last thing we want to do. You need to know that sometimes you are put in a situation where the choice of what to do is taken away from you by the other person’s actions.
On a final note, it is interesting that the actual technique used was indeed one of the very first techniques that I taught last year in the weapons defence seminar (and one that I stressed at the time was the most important). I will, of course, be teaching this again in 2 weeks time at the latest weapon defence seminar…
As this student said to me ‘Sifu, Wing Tsun just saved my life…’
Sifu