Why am I here?

When I signed the membership forms for my class, there was a section headed: ‘Why do you want to study Wing Chun.’ I scribbed down ‘fitness and self defence’ which, Sifu later told me, is pretty much what everyone writes. ‘There’s so much more to training than that,’ he said. Eight months in, I know what he means. If I was signing up today, I would write down just one word – focus.

Wing Chun is excellent for building strength and fitness and for defending yourself. But what I get most out of it is the ability to switch off to everything else I’ve got going on – work, relationships, money – and focus on one thing. That one thing is the training and it occupies my mind for the duration of the class and for hours afterwards. I can’t think of anything that I have to concentrate on so intently as I do with kung fu. I’m not in to meditation but I understand the idea to be relaxation by emptying your mind, often starting by concentrating on your breathing. Wing Chun relaxes my mind as I concentrate on my movements and the movements of the person in front of me, nothing else.

I concentrate hard because I have to. At 32, it’s rare to be taking up something completely new. Trying out a new sport cannot be compared to it if, like me, you are sporty already. Let’s take handball - I’ve never played it but I reckon you could stick me in a game right now, outline the rules and I wouldn’t disgrace myself. Because, you see, I play football so I can run and see passes and I used to play a lot of basketball and a bit of rugby so I can throw and catch. I’ve never played baseball either but I’ve swung a cricket bat and a tennis racket on countless occasions so I’m pretty confident of giving a ball a whack, even if the thing I’m hitting it with is a different shape. I know I’m simplifying but the point is, no sport involving running, throwing, kicking, catching or hitting is alien to me.

Kung fu, on the other hand, is different to everything else I know. I’m learning it from a starting point of zero and it put me off taking it up for a while because it frustrates me not to be good at something.

Now, though, I wish I had taken it up years ago because that lack of pre-knowledge and filling in that blank has been so rewarding. Many martial arts have a strong spiritual element to them. Wing Chun, however, is an art developed purely as a means of fighting. That’s one of the reasons I chose it because I didn’t think I needed any spiritual guidance. I thought I needed something for fitness and self defence. Being a complete novice, though, has forced me to empty my mind by concentrating on the art. It has given me focus and that, I suppose, is a spiritual thing.

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