Why You Should Learn To Fight

Learning to fight does not mean loving violence. It means stopping being a person who can only hope that the world will be kind and peaceful.

It means becoming compatible with reality.

Peace only has moral value when it is born from someone who is capable of doing harm and decides not to do so. If you can’t fight, you are not peaceful. You are harmless.

Being harmless is not a virtue. It’s a condition. It may be comfortable, even socially rewarding, but it is not kindness.

Kindness requires choice. And only those who have the freedom to choose can choose, and that freedom is not obtained without power.

Many people confuse disability with virtue. Since he cannot do harm, he calls his helplessness peace. And those who are capable of exercising violence, he singles out and denounces them as if they were beasts.

That is the tyranny of the weak: converting their own powerlessness into moral superiority.

I’m not saying this from a philosophical fantasy about violence. I speak from a long relationship with combat and strategy.

Since I was little, combat always caught my attention. I felt attracted to him. It was something fun to watch. It was beautiful.

The need to defend myself from attacks and abuse led me to train a martial art for the first time. At that time I was obsessed with boxing. So boxing went.

Throughout my youth I experienced different styles: karate, sanda, muay thai, etc.

During college I started with kendo and iaido. Swords have always attracted me. They have a unique elegance and beauty.

To this day, I continue training the basics on my own. I will train in a gym again.

I am not an absolute expert, nor do I claim to be. But I also don’t speak from the comfort of someone who has never been punched in the face.

Most of us don’t go around looking for problems. But there are times in life when problems look for you.

And sooner or later, they arrive.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: knowing that problems are coming, what are you going to do? Are you going to prepare to face them? Or are you going to run away?

What would you prefer, to be a warrior in a garden? Or a gardener in a war?

Those who know how to use a sword but keep it sheathed will inherit the earth.

When you know that you can defend yourself, when you know the capacity you have for destruction, you walk differently. You speak differently. You move differently.

Not because of arrogance. On the contrary: because you no longer have anything to prove. Because you have absolute confidence in yourself. Because you have gone through training, physical conditioning, combat and competitions that have redefined your limits.

The truly dangerous person is not the one who threatens. She is the one who silently contains her anger and waits for the moment to act.

Don’t look for violence. Don’t romanticize her. Don’t use it to fill ego voids. But don’t repudiate it, nor hate it, because it is part of you.

But understand this: there are times when violence is necessary. To defend your body, your home, your family, your dignity.

At that point, it is not enough to be right. You have to be able to act.

Never strike the first blow. But make sure there won’t be a second.