Friday, October 19, 2001

Taking on Taekwondo

Everyone, these days, is comparing notes on how to “carry on” with daily routines as the world news spins more and more out of control – how we are finding meaning in small gestures, the comforting domestic patterns worn soft like old velvet. I have surprised myself by finding solace in learning something new. While I am a small, bookish writing teacher – a pacifist– I have turned unexpectedly to the martial. I’ve taken the leap from my home in the Liberal Arts to the wild frontier of the Martial Arts. At age 35, I am learning Taekwondo.

It wasn’t actually my idea. My 7 year old daughter dreamed up Taekwondo lessons for herself, out of a vague reaction against dance classes and attraction to a library book called Night of the Ninjas. Watching my daughter in her early lessons, I envied the way she took so willingly to these unfamiliar movements. I loved hearing her explosive yell when she snapped a kick or flew a punch. I loved seeing her testing her own powerful muscles, her hair flying as she spun and kicked, often the only girl in a class of bouncing wiry boys with Jackie Chan dialogue on the tips of their tongues. “You GO, girl” I chanted to myself, watching a little version of my DNA whirling in the fray. Girl power. I was happy for her. But I wanted some for myself.

When my daughter graduated to the next belt level, she invited me to follow her in lessons of my own. I have hardly been the same since.

To put it mildly, these martial movements do not come naturally to me. At my first lesson, the instructor taught me some basic moves, and then encouraged me to try, at the moment of punching or kicking impact, the gee-yup, or yell, – the explosion of air and sound that keeps you from holding your breath. I was SO self-conscious about the yell – it was the only part of starting lessons I’d been dreading. Like a good academic, I had been listening carefully to the students in my daughter’s classes for weeks, straining to catch the exact sound: Was it “ay-ah!” or more like “hi-ya!” – or just “ai!” Or a more Yiddish-inflected “oy!”? I couldn’t tell. I tried a few versions nervously for my instructor that first day, and then asked him how the sound would be spelled. He stared at me blankly for a moment, and then asked if I was a teacher. This I admitted, but kept pressing him—“So. . if you were to write it, you’d spell it. . . how?” He would not be cornered. “You know – just “h’ya!” – try “H’ya” until you’re comfortable with whatever comes out naturally, he said. So—this is what I use, and must confess that I still picture the letters on the page most times I say it. .. like that poor guy Jeff Goldblum plays in _Annie Hall_ who keeps forgetting his own mantra.

It’s hard to say what I love most about this strange new world of sweat and sore muscles and adrenalin. As a woman, raised in a family of daughters, piano lessons and no real sports experience, I’m energized by my transgression – participating in an aspect of culture marked as “masculine,” as beyond my reach. As a teacher, it’s a great relief to be a student again – and to model myself after the best students in my own classes, who really Pay Attention, who take risks, who are willing look – and sound – foolish, and allow themselves to be changed, irrevocably, by the process of learning something new. And as a person who spends too much time with people just like myself, this new world is one where the white belt peers I’m partnered with in kicking exercises might be scarily coordinated 8-year-old boys, yodel-voiced junior high types I never see on my campus or at the Chocolate Café, or graying men using Taekwondo for cardio and confidence. This willingness to be a foolish beginner, to get to know people unlike ourselves, and to re-imagine the world from an entirely new perspective – pretty much captures my sense of what I hope we’ll do as a country right now, on the cusp of this terrible opportunity to re-imagine ourselves, and move our hearts, minds, bodies and words in directions that may be painful in their unfamiliarity.

For now, I’m paying attention to this feeling of newness, of being on the cusp of fresh understanding, and, in the small universe of my own body, in the midst of an exciting – if painful – new orientation. After my daughter and I got back from class last night, I practiced some side kicks in front of the hall mirror, admiring the snowy crispness of my brand new first kobok, or uniform. I watched my reversed self make these unfamiliar movements, let fly a few low punches and high blocks, and whispered to myself the joking catch phrase from my husband’s boyhood rough-housing: “So – you fear my hands.” I didn’t quite believe it, but I hope I have powers beyond what I’ve imagined. I hope we all do.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on October 19, 2001
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