Writing and Taekwondo

At the end of each semester, I always spend a little time reflecting on what students have learned, wondering whether I've taught them enough, and simultaneously wondering about the very old question of how writing can be truly taught. This sometimes leads me to think about tae-kwon-do, the martial art form that can be roughly described as "Korean karate."

I took a semester of tae-kwon-do as a P.E. elective while attending the University of Texas in Austin, and while I was quite untalented in and ill-suited to this sport, I learned something about the connection between the mind and body and also about how we learn. My poor performance in mastering the actual moves of tae-kwon-do probably helped me to learn these particular lessons more acutely, even if in a painful sort of way.

It's become a bit of a cliche to use martial-arts metaphors when musing on the ways in which we can lead a more stress-free life and stop struggling against unchanging forces, but there's a reason the comparisons seem so apt. In comparison to fighting styles that emphasize force or strength, Eastern martial arts especially depend on the mind-body connection and on learning to use outside forces in your favor instead of struggling against those forces. The word "do" (the third part of tae-kwon-do) translates to "way" or "path," which brings to mind the "paths" associated with Buddhist enlightenment. As Mr. Miagi from Karate Kid puts it (yes, I'm quoting a silly 1980s movie): "We learn to fight so that we don't have to fight."  In martial arts, paradoxically, you also learn not to fight in order to learn how to fight. Almost all of the Eastern martial arts emphasize using an opponent's movements against him, and learning not to expend energy in wasteful ways.

I earned a yellow belt at the end of my semester of tae-kwon-do, but I didn't feel as if I had mastered much in way of fighting moves. My instructor, a middle-aged Korean man who was quite short but whose power you could feel as he maneuvered you with his hands (yes, like Mr. Miagi), observed me toward the end of the semester and asked if I had missed many classes.

"No," I replied, although I knew what he meant. I was awkward in my movements, and I still had too much self-consciousness about my body. I still thought about tae-kwon-do too much as I went through the motions, and thinking about it too much is not only antithetical to an entire Eastern worldview, it's also quite counterproductive when it comes to fighting, especially Eastern martial arts. Ideally, it becomes like playing a musical instrument. You think about it at first, but when you've mastered the techniques, you learn to let go and focus on the emotion.

That little yell people do when chopping blocks of wood with their hands? This represents this idea of "clearing your head" in some form. The yell is a kind of meditation, a way of pushing out distracting thoughts in order to focus your physical and mental energy on the hit or kick.

In that direct sense, writing can be compared to tae-kwon-do because it is a kind of meditative act that involves getting into a kind of "zone" in which you forget you're writing altogether.  This is not as mystical as it sounds, because the best writing (before editing) involves pure thinking and learning to let go of the mental barriers that prevent us from writing in the first place. Of course the analogy only goes so far. In a paradoxical way, learning to write is quite different from fighting, because writing must be done with mental clarity and, at least by some definition, writing is "thinking too much." Also, good writing of nonfiction involves taking ownership of what you're writing and understanding, with some degree of "self-consciousness," that it needs to be understood by others.

Another parallel in this comparison involves the nature of learning. As I have pointed out, I was no great tae-kwon-do fighter when I earned my yellow belt, but you wouldn't expect a "yellow belt" to be too much of an expert, would you? The great thing about the belt system is that it defines degrees of learning and rewards the learning process as much as the results. As my Korean instructor pointed out, the belt, even a black belt, does not necessarily designate an absolute level of mastery or how much of a "bad ass" a particular belted person might be, but it does represent an accomplishment in learning. It is a sign that you have learned up to a certain level and mastered those lessons on some level.

Sometimes with writing, I think we expect mastery to come too quickly, when the reality is that every writer is a writer in process. Every good writer is always learning, because improvement is always possible. Successfully completing freshman composition does not mean that a young writer "knows how to write" in every possible situation or that they have mastered the craft of writing. It simply means that they have, hopefully, learned to take ownership of their process and to understand that they are in control of their own writing. I desire most of all to impart to students the idea that they don't write papers for me. I don't need more papers to read. They write papers to develop their own thinking and, in conjunction, their own writing.  
You must learn to not write in order to write, and you must learn to write so that you do not have to see writing as an impossible task involving procrastination and anxiety.