Mastery sneaks up on you
focus on the atelic to get the telic
I haven’t written a jiu-jitsu post for a while, so I hope you are willing to indulge me a bit. It’s been about 15 months since I started training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu again. Sometimes it is useful to write a weekly newsletter where I share such decisions because I can go back into the archives and find my thoughts. My July 12, 2023 RWL (#351) was me all breathlessly talking about how great it was to be back training… after one class. In the time between then I have stuck with it, but there were many moments where I doubted why I was bothering. I’m in my mid-50’s - isn’t this a young person’s pursuit? Getting slammed on the mat, choked, arm-barred, and twisted up like a pretzel is fun and all, but is this something worth my time? Is this part of living a worthy life?
I have to admit, those were mostly the moments where I didn’t feel like I was making progress. And as much as I talked about the pursuit of the martial arts as a journey and not a destination, I was frustrated that I felt like my journey was just going in circles - circles of me repeatedly being tapped out and mostly just losing all the time.
In that post, I wrote, “The practice of martial arts is a journey, it is atelic, not telic.” quoting another previous post where I talked about Kieran Setiya’s book Midlife where he used these terms. A telic activity is one with a clear purpose - an end one is pursuing. An atelic activity is one you engage in because the act of engaging in it is the purpose. One runs a race to win, one goes out for a walk in the woods because walking in the woods is inherently pleasurable.
Many of my colleagues at the jiu-jitsu school compete. They win medals and bragging rights. My school has some pretty good players, at least on the local scene. Jiu-jitsu also has a belt system, so there are goals in that sense. One goes to practice, at least in part, to make progress along the belt system. So there is a telic component to jiu-jitsu, and I think it was the telic component that was making me wonder, why the hell am I doing this? because I was not seeing the telic outcomes.
But there are atelic components to jiu-jitsu, and they are the more important components. We call our workouts practice, as in “are you going to practice tomorrow?” It’s appropriate because what we do is a practice. It is a repeated, ongoing effort. The atelic components include comradery - this is a hard thing, and we do it together, and exercise of body and spirit - when you practice BJJ, almost every class involves some rolling (what we call live sparring). You cannot spar live without pushing both your body and your spirit. Unlike going to the gym to lift weights, your partner is trying to best you. It requires bringing your physical and mental self. After a good practice, it is hard not to feel alive, even if you have been roundly trounced. It’s a thing worth doing for its own sake, because it exercises (literally) the gifts of body and mind we have been given.
So, like I said, I haven’t written a jiu-jitsu post for a while, but I hope as you were reading the above, you were drawing comparisons to your own activities. I think there are telic and atelic components to much of life. Doing things that exercise our gifts, that hone our talents, are inherently worthwhile. Whether it’s jiu-jitsu or writing a newsletter, or knitting, or something else.
In the last month or so I’ve been coming home from practice and telling TLW that I feel like something has shifted - like I have come to the end of a skill plateau and I am beginning to climb again. Slowly climb, please. But some elevation has been gained. A little telic gratification is feeding my ability to be all atelic about going to practice. I think that is the key to mastering something hard and worthy. It is focusing on the atelic, and the telic mastery sneaks up on you.