Towards Freedom

For the first time in my life, I questioned my faith in the innate goodness/beauty of all humans. I have seen and felt painful and cold aspects of being human in myself and others but nothing really shook a basic trust I had for limitless beauty in this world. Are the questions now…so what? Or what the heck are you talking about?

I am talking about what I have been learning about globalization and capitalism. It's weird, that I have lived in a country, a 'third world' country none the less (Sri Lanka), which was immersed in a violent civil war. I have felt what it like to have machine guns pointed at me wherever I go and know that I wasn't liked because of the culture and heritage I was born into, in some sense because of who I was.

As a martial artist, I used to wonder if there was one ultimate way to focus one's combat skills, if a style could be developed that took out all the stylistic frills and utilized scientific principles to form a perfect combat system. My reasoning was, if most human bodies are essentially the same, surely there's one specific method of fighting that's superior, and the plethora of styles within martial arts are just culturally-influenced deviations from this hypothetical one-true-way.