Born Free - MIA. brilliant

today sucked but then i got 2 flying triangle chokes during training thanks to a rodrigo gracie video

Consider again that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. - sagan

(via bthewave)

been studying this for anatomy class all day

“everything that the light touches is part of our kingdom.”

stole this from my friend jon

“ I just know there’s something dark in me and I hide it. I certainly don’t talk about it, but it’s there always, this Dark Passenger. And when he’s driving, I feel alive, half sick with the thrill of complete wrongness. I don’t fight him, I don’t want to. He’s all I’ve got. Nothing else could love me, not even… especially not me. Or is that just a lie the Dark Passenger tells me? Because lately there are these moments when I feel connected to something else… someone. It’s like the mask is slipping and things… people… who never mattered before are suddenly starting to matter. It scares the hell out of me. “

Okay, so this is actually a quote from the TV series Dexter, secretly and metaphorically describing his serial killer persona, but I thought they were actually a couple great lines that capture the feeling of any unwanted part of an identity, feeling the burden of something you can’t help but carry around.

The ego is kind of like Dexter’s “dark passenger,” this kind of negative being that lurks deep within everyone.

Jiu-jitsu has made me think quite a lot about the ego, not only because the sport makes you more self-aware but because it deals with guys trying to kick each others’ asses all the time.  It’s easy to see that having a big ego makes learning jiu-jitsu extremely difficult.  No matter who you are you must constantly get beat and suffer to improve at all.  Those who are constantly trying to feed an ego have to deal with the burden of trying to constantly win at all costs.  However, it’s too simple to say “lose your ego. Just get rid of it.”  But I believe that no matter who you are, that screaming demon impatiently waits and cannot simply be disconnected.

When it comes to the ego, I have a couple thoughts and many questions.  Where does the line stop between having a positive self-image and allowing your ego to rear its ugly head?   Doesn’t having some ego push you to get better?

Many of us have trained with people who become extremely angry if they get tapped and who readily show it.  But is it truly better to only show calmness but boil on the inside?  Worse than a blatant display of pride is the ego that shrouds itself in elitism, the kind that “quietly” thinks it’s better.  So how do we escape our egos?  Do we simply listen to what we know is good advice?  I find the cognitive dissonance truly fascinating that often happens during training.  There are always those situations when you make mistakes, get tapped, or receive sharp criticism your head will point you toward wisdom but bad feelings will brew inside anyway.

In a sport where the goals are submissions, nonverbal communication becomes very important.  Holding a choke a little longer than necessary, a pat on the head, or even breathing a certain way are all actions that take on certain meanings and mean drastically different things depending who does them.  This is why understanding ones ego and how it effects his or her interactions with fellow training partners and competitors is so important.  Jiu-jitsu is a world with a structure that sits upon a contradiction – a hierarchy built upon the strength of weakness.

The main thing to remember, I feel, is your training partner.  If you take care of those around you and keep them healthy and improving, then they will improve you. And more often than not, you forget about the rat race.