Indigenous Ability

  The erudite martial scholars among us will recognize that title as a quote from the ancient Chinese essay The Thirty-Six Strategies . It is tenet #14. [FYI-I use the masterful Thomas Cleary translation.] The tenet is vaguely cryptic, but only a smidge. Those steeped in the poetic metaphor of Chinese teachings will immediately divine the advice. Let us dig into “ Borrow a Corpse to Bring Back a Spirit .” The advice is an urging to resurrect tactics and strategies that have fallen by the way. To burrow into what may have been unjustly forgotten. Let us allow our translator, Mr. Cleary himself, to still the waters. “… don't use what everyone else is using, but use what others aren't using . This can mean reviving something that has dropped out of use through neglect, or finding uses for things that have hitherto been ignored or considered useless .” The advice is to resurrect the useful, NOT to reanimate the deservedly dead. It is a directive to become marti...

  You are a hunter. A stalking predator. Your species was borne and shaped by forces that led Y-O-U, the only “hunting ape” on the planet to stalk game, read sign, divine past and future behavior of prey. You are descended from gimlet-eyed Sherlocks Holmeses of the prairies, deserts, jungles, mountains, and seashores. Whether the personal Y-O-U still hunt or use your evolved skills to gather sustenance or not, that innate urge to stalk, seek and emerge victorious is within you. We “window shop” and “scroll” in attempts to satisfy a psychology and physiology that craves the hunt, that burns to seek anew. We have turned these skills from matters of survival and sustenance to attempts to divine “ Why Carol gave me that look? ” or “ What do these disparate events in the news really mean? ” We seek to fill the tangible concrete skill gap that was formerly used to look for the overturned leaf and snapped twig that said “ prey/dinner went this way.” We have turned survival s...

  Cold water plunges. Cold showers. Polar plunges. Many a claim is made for such practices, but it turns out that all may be based on little more than fad du jour. Such training practices are cyclical, in six months, we’ll all be shouting from the rooftops about the benefits of UV exposure on our nether bits [t’is an actual claim]or holding oat bran under our tongues while we train [that, too], or some such thing, hell, leg-warmers may be back in fashion by then. What’s more cold-water immersion studies have shown that the practice may actually inhibit strength and muscle adaptation—the exact opposite, one would assume, of those who use such tactics. We’ll get to the science, but first, let us begin with the “why” of the practice for many and how this why may be sought elsewhere. Let’s look to a passage from Conrad Richter’ well-researched novel, The Light in the Forest that mentions cold “training” which was indeed a part of many a tribal culture. “ The boy was ...