ESSAY // FAIL AGAIN. FAIL BETTER
Back to Life
From our skulls to tiptoes, we are idiosyncratic. Our art can be, too
by Walter Foley
images by Lisa Schaffer
EXCERPT //
The very idea of “tapping out” is an innovation in and of itself, now heavily emphasized in training for mixed martial arts everywhere. Rather than spend most of their time repeating drills while standing in a row in front of a mirror, Brazilian jiu-jitsu instructors encourage students to jump into the chaos very early in the process: Stand or kneel in front of your (more experienced) training partner, try to pin them down (or try to do anything, really), and discover for yourself just how easily you will be tied into knots by someone much smaller and physically weaker than you, simply due to the difference in experience. Tap once you’re in trouble, and try again. As the student’s body and brain absorb new information in non-articulatable ways, they can—slowly, very slowly, with intervals of guidance along the way—learn to grapple effectively.
Having learned some aspects of Brazilian jiu-jitsu over the past year—very slowly, very staggeringly—I’m captivated by the similarities it shares with the best moments of my musical education. There are things that I can do now that I recently wasn’t able to, but how it happened is alluringly unclear. The mistakes take the shape of discrete little episodes, but the victories just seem to emerge.
Learning is never really about linking an unbroken series of successes. What would that even look like?
It makes no sense to demand perfection at every stage, even though there’s occasionally an implication in the air somewhere that it’s possible.
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