สำหรับประสบการณ์ที่ "For the Experience"

After seven long hours of training, I was ready for my first Saturday in Thailand to come to an end.  I was in a state of blissful exhaustion; one of those moods where all you want to do is absorb the environment around you rather than participate in it.

The Thai evening began its warm embrace of darkness and jungle sweat - from waxy green leaves rose a mysterious and enduring symphony of endless insects, vendors ran out of coconuts, and nocturnal millipedes glided gracefully across the black asphalt like shadows.  Street dogs lay on the side of the road in a coma-like sleep.  Food stalls were draped off with tarps and the lonely flourescent light of the 7-11 burned on into the coming night.

Yet on this night, the camp was far from asleep; the cars and vans of the gym owners sat waiting, loaded with Thai fighters and farang (foreigners), ready to make a two-hour trek to the rural wilds of Bangkok, Amphawa Samutsongkram.  There was not enough room for everyone to go; the owners shuffled us around, talking to each other frantically in Thai.  I lucked out; the manager offered me a seat in the car with one of the trainers and two of the fighters who would be competing that night.

I rode with two fighters, both from vastly different worlds.  One was an Italian who had been fighting in Bangkok intermittently for the past several years.  The first time I met him was on one of the morning 10k runs; he was running through the wet heat of Bangkok...in a sweat suit.  Running through the most intense heat and humidity I had ever experienced...practically wrapped in a body bag, a thick black plastic suit for weight cutting.  He smiled as he recognized me from the gym, jogging by with a cordial Hello.  I was humbled immediately; not only did fighters run in this heat, they ran in this heat in sweat suits, and did it with a smile.

The second fighter was a thirteen-year-old Idaho boy with a lisp named Hunter.  You would never suspect by looking at him that he had over forty professional Muay Thai fights under his belt, or that he had lived in Japan and in fact spoke Japanese, or that he was living in Bangkok alone.  I no doubt believed him when he stated, authoritatively and without the slightest hesitation, "I will fight in the UFC when I grow up."  This thirteen-year-old was far more fearless and wise than many adults I knew.

"I hate it when other kids think I'm just some sort of nerd, or that I can't fight." He laughed with a kind of self-assurance most men couldn't muster, musing that "I can always kick their ass, though!"

I wondered in awe at how someone could be so young and already have lived so fiercely, so fully, so fantastically.  I wondered in awe at how I could be so privileged as to meet such amazing and inspiring people.

In the midst of this reverie, we made a 7-11 stop so that the Italian could refuel.  Come to find out that not only had he been cutting weight, but that his weigh-in was only an hour --- one hour --- before his fight.  He sat in the backseat sucking down a coconut before passing out for the rest of the ride, trying to get back some iota of the energy drained away running through Bangkok in a sweat suit.

Amphawa Floating Market, Thailand

We arrived in Amphawa at almost ten at night.  The stadium was an open-air festival, a stage set up on wild grass and between decaying, ancient Thai buildings.  Amphawa is a sleepy river town known mostly for its floating market, but when the boats are docked and Saturday night sets in, the town comes alive for Muay Thai.  Hundreds of spectators stand or sit in folding chairs, sandwiched between ice cream vendors and the giant dancing stage pulsating with live music and gyrating half-naked Thai women.  Outside the archways and beyond the grass, street food vendors fill the paved parking lot, filling the air with the scent of fried meats and the sugary-sweet of Cokes from glass bottles.

Food Vendor outside the stadium fights of Amphawa

Full rules Muay Thai was already underway as we crowded backstage to prepare the fighters.  They were rubbed down head to toe in Thai oil and greased for the purpose of making it harder to land a deadly blow.  They lay on the pavement on worn grass mats, closing their eyes in focus, blocking out the world and its gyrating Thai women and screaming crowds.

We settled in to watch the fights before our Kaewsamrit fighters came on.  Hunter won his fight; the Italian lost.

As we drove home that night, the Thai coach told the Italian in broken English, "next time, you

Street food outside of the Amphawa fight arena

Entrance to Amphawa fight arena

fight for de experien."  The Italian paused for a moment, puzzled.  "If not for the experience, what then?"  The coach's English didn't stretch that far; the nuance of the abstraction was lost in translation.  Isn't all fighting for the experience, the experience of at least something, be it winning, money, or glory?  How does one fight for non-experience, other than to experience non-existence?  I thought of a quote I had just read from Siddhartha, about the way we experience life generally:

"When someone is seeking," said Siddartha, "It happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal.  Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.  You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose."  -Herman Hesse, Siddartha

What I took the coach to mean was this: if you focus only on winning or any other singular goal, you overwhelm yourself with tension and become blind to your opponent's maneuvers against you.  You lose the ability to "think like a fighter" and react to the situation you find yourself currently in, be it a clinch or a southpaw or a strange new style.  Many a fighting coach chants the familiar words to fighters, "relax, relax, relax."  What this means is to clear your mind of any goal, to focus only on absorbing the visceral reality of the situation, to trust utterly the instincts you have trained by merely following a flow of action and reaction based on the simple reality of what your senses perceive.  You see the punch, you block it.  You see the opening, you take it.  Bruce Lee explained it this way in his essay on gung fu:

"[the principle of gung fu] has to grow spontaneously, like a flower, in a mind free from emotions and desires.  The core principle of [this] is Tao - the spontaneity of the universe."

After explaining his initial frustrations with learning the "art of detachment" inherent in fighting, Lee explains his revelation further in his famous water analogy:

"On the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water!  Right then - at that moment - a thought suddenly struck me; was not this water the very essence of gung fu?  Hadn't this water just now illustrated to me the principle of gung fu?  I struck it but it did not suffer hurt.  Again I struck it with all of my might - yet it was not wounded!  I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible.  This water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak.  In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world.  That was it!  I wanted to be like the nature of water.
Lee continues, "Suddenly a bird flew by and cast its reflection on the water.  Right then as I was absorbing myself with the lesson of the water, another mystic sense of hidden meaning revealed itself to me; should not the thoughts and emotions I had when in front of an opponent pass like the reflection of the bird flying over the water?"

This was one possible interpretation of "for the experience."  As I contemplated what the coach's thoughts were, Hunter worked to help translate.  The coach spoke Thai and Japanese; Hunter spoke Japanese and English.  In a game of international telephone, Hunter asked the coach in Japanese what he had meant, then translating to English for the Italian.

"He means fight for the experience, as in don't focus just on winning or just on one thing.  Just relax, have fun, go with it, enjoy yourself," Hunter said.  Huh, I thought.  Not too far off the mark from what I was thinking of.

"Oh, okay, okay, I see what you mean," the Italian said.

As we drove home to the gym, mostly in silence, thunder and lightening lit up the entire skyline.  Rain loomed ahead of us, but the storm passed around us.  We drove on.  As the dark night flashed alive, I listened to the conversations in Thai and Japanese, devoid of meaning to me.  I sat empty, letting the world flow by and flow through me, absorbing as much of it as I could.

I closed my eyes and listened.  I thought of how unpredictable and at times extreme life in Bangkok could be, how wild and wonderful life in a Muay Thai camp was.  I savored it in its entirety, thinking of all the amazing things I had already done.

All amazing, if only I kept letting it be.  Fun, if only I kept letting go of fear.  An opportunity to truly grow and change, if only I kept relaxing.  All "for the experience."

Day One, Part Two - The Language of Muay Thai

I don't speak Thai.  Not a word.  In fact, before I began my first day of training, the only Thai words I knew were "Muay Thai."

Here I am, this English-speaking lawyer who spent her entire life fine-tuning the niceties of language, the subtleties of wordplay, and the rules of grammar.  I can write you a legal brief and outline an article as if it were second-nature.  I can analyze, rationalize, proselytize, orate, narrate, and speak in Lawyer as if I were speaking in tongues, if you'd like.  After a lifetime of reading, writing, poetry --- years of formal education, endless hours alone with words --- I can be a dancing one-woman show of words.  Sure, no problem.

Most of the trainers didn't understand much of what I said, aside from the most basic of information like my name and the country I'm from.  I wanted to tell them all about how much I loved their sport, how much I admired it, how much I respected everything they stood for, and how invaluable their training would be to me.  But, I was at a loss for words; there was no Thai in my brain to explain it.

But Muay Thai is a universal language in and of itself.  I came to realize this during my first day training in a different country with a formidable language barrier.  I didn't need to explain how much I loved their sport; everything I wanted to say about it translated with perfect clarity through each punch, kick, and check that I did.

For all the English I had studied, I had immersed myself in a second language for the past year without really knowing it; with each day of training, I had been learning the language of Muay Thai.   I had been building a universal physical vocabulary that would work for me whichever Muay Thai gym I should go to, no matter the spoken language.  No words can ever translate a teep or an elbow; no words are necessary.

As soon as I began to work with the trainers and hit the pads and bags, the language of Muay Thai spoke for me.  My work denoted what my experience level was, so I didn't need to tell them; they could see what I already knew, exactly what changes to make, and where I could be better.   English became irrelevant.  Spinning elbows, teeps, sweeps, jabs, rights, low kicks; these all became the words we all knew.  The combinations became the sentences with which we would speak to each other.  Sparring would be our conversations; it was the same back-and-forth flow of physical poetry I knew from Blackhouse, the very same I fell in love with what seems like the longest year ago.  And if the practitioners and teachers of Muay Thai are poets, then these men are the Shakespeares.  After all is said and done, I find myself again to be a student of language and poetry, this time spoken with the "eight limbs."  A situation new but all-too-familiar, comforting in its homeliness, strikingly reassuring.

Day One, Part One - The Sound of Bangkok

"Coooock-a-doodle-doo, motherfucker!"

My eyes snapped open instantly.  Huh, I thought, waking with the roosters.  I really only thought that happened in movies.  Guess not.  I looked over at my cell phone, an alarm set for thirty minutes later, now rendered useless by the natural process of this place.  No, Western Girl, you don't need a cell phone to wake up, not here.

At about four thirty in the morning, in the complete absence of light, in a small room in the thick heat of a small Bangkok suburb miles from the city, a merry band of roosters began to crow outside of my window.  Just outside my window.  They did so insistently, constantly; I half expected one of them to scratch through my window and peck me awake, a look in his eye saying, "time to train, get up, RUN!"

Soon after, the steady beat of body parts smacking bags streamed through my window.  Every three minutes or so, the sound of a bell (the old-school kind, rung by hand, nothing electronic) punctuated the grunts and exertions of the men training and the coaches yelling outside.  Just outside my window.  The world of Muay Thai, just a short walk outside my bedroom door.

I heard far more of Bangkok before I ever saw it.  I arrived in the middle of the night, midnight to be exact, after a seventeen hour journey by airplane; a three hour layover in Japan sandwiched between two seven-hour flights.  I hardly remember the airport in Tokyo.  I remember shuffling around in a circle, dazed, hulking luggage awkwardly, ready to shank someone for a bottle of water and a comfortable place to sit.  Soup, I thought, water.  LORD GIVE ME SOUP.  WATER.  LIQUIDS.  NOW.  I stopped my no doubt super sexy zombie walk in front of a glowing airport restaurant sign illuminated with giant, detailed pictures of authentic Japanese Soba and teriyaki chicken.  Bottles of water tucked away neatly in a tiny counter fridge, standing regimented in Romaji-written rows like soldiers ready to fight the exhaustion of travel.  Beckoning me, calling to me; drink, and you shall be restored.  Stop.  Rest.

Stop and rest I did.  I ate like a sick child, tired, slurping soup slowly and oblivious to the world around me for a few moments of blissful relief.  When I eventually stood up to leave, a few Japanese girls gasped in awe at my stuffed killer whale (named Shmu) tucked under my arm.  They approached me excitedly and asked me something in Japanese, pointing to Shmu with giant smiles.  "SeaWorld, San Diego," I said.  Nothing but blank stares.  I tried something more general.  "Uhh, California."  This got knowing nods and exclamations; "Ohhhh, California! Dolphin, yes?"  The tour guide in me couldn't help it.  I pointed to Shmu with my best tour guide smile and said, "killer whale, orca."  They were positively ecstatic at this information.  I let them pet Shmu for a few minutes.  Then, with some energy renewed and a single-mindedness to get to Bangkok, I turned over my empty bowls and headed for the next flight.

Hot Japanese Soba Noodles and Teriyaki Chicken, Narita Airport, Japan

I should mention here that these were my fist international flights, so I was also pleasantly surprised at the fact that I got served free hot food.  All of my domestic flights have never done this; usually, it's just a small, overpriced deli menu of fruit and cheese plates and wine.  You can see how thoroughly I enjoyed this little perk:

Thank you, Delta Airlines.  I also appreciated the small screen provided for each seat which allowed me to play unlimited movies, TV, and chart where the flight was at:

When I finally arrived at the airport in Suvarnabhumi, I longed for a bed and a good night's sleep.  I stepped off the plane and the heat and humidity hit me like a punch to the face.  I was squeezed onto a packed bus to the terminal, all of us tired and sweating on each other.  Drops of water fell on my shoulder.  The air conditioning unit dripped moisture down in a slow stream.  I eventually met up with and found the escort from the gym who would pick me up.  After a brief introduction, we took a taxi to the camp for about forty minutes.  I was useless during this time, half-awake, half-listening to the gym instructor-escort and taxi driver laugh and talk jovially in Thai.  I paid him, got a room and a key, and I practically fell onto the bed, lights out cold.

This morning, as I lay in the dark and listened in awe to the sounds of this new reality, I could feel the truth of that presence just outside my window with all the senses aside from sight; I could hear it, I could smell it as Thai cooking from the gym kitchen, I could touch it in the rough feel of the sheets, I could taste it in the humid air.  A dream finally made real.

Some moments, when the reality of a major decision sets in, you question if what you did was right.  If it at all made sense.

This was not one of those moments - there was absolutely no question, laying there in the dark on a typical Bangkok Thursday morning.  As I felt the day bloom around me, I felt a sense of excitement, belonging and content before I even set foot outside.  This was it.  No more planning to be done.  I had set up the door, now all I had to do was literally walk through it, go outside, and begin.

So I did.