My favourite waste of time

"When I was young I studied books and
swordsmanship
and rode off with a shout to the Capital,
where, I heard, the barbarians had been driven off
already...
there was no place left for heroes.
So I came back to these crested peaks,
lay down and listened to the clear stream flow.
Young men dream of glory:
monkeys riding on the ox's back."
-Shih Te (8th century), trans. JP Seaton

Recently I have been pondering the great uselessness of the martial arts. However much we can say that they increase confidence, health, co-ordination and the like, this is all a smoke screen. We don't really know why we practice them. It is one of those Taoist truisms that the value of the vessel lies in its emptiness, but until now I've never really appreciated this. As I get older, I am guilty of using my martial arts to beat up one person and one person alone: myself. I have recently become atttached to training for some purpose: to become a better teacher, perhaps to earn a living one day,perhaps so I can write some killer martial arts book and become the big cheese. But this approach has caused me no end of strife. Basically, I need to lighten up, and remember that the martial arts at their best are play, mere play. A good friend of mine who is a Tang Soo Do practitioner, put it like this: "When people ask why I do the martial arts, I tell them that I do them so I can stand on one leg and do up my shoelaces, or so that I can place a mug on a table and have the bottom of it touch the tabletop all at once." How utterly useless the martial arts are. How lucky that for us there are no barbarians left to kill.