Greetings, friends. (XXXIII)

Greetings, friends. Yesterday I went to a martial arts class for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Way back in 2016, I was in need of an exercise discipline that didn’t involve trudging up and down Twin Peaks, and as I have mentioned before, I am strongly motivated by social expectation. If there is a place I need to be at a particular time, and people who are expecting me to be there, I am much much more likely to do it.

Anyway, training in martial arts had long been a bucket list item for me. Also it was 2016 and good old grassroots American fascism had freshly reared its ugly homunculus head.

At the time, I was working out of an office at 17th & Mission Streets, and I knew that if I had to go all the way to, say, the Presidio for classes, I was going to find ways to weasel out of it. The dojo, whatever it was, had to be within a 10 or 15 minute walk of my office.

Well, there were three martial arts schools within the requisite half mile range. One of them, though, was a very traditional looking, hide-bound karate school, and that didn’t interest me much. Another one seemed more like a cult than a martial arts school, per se.

And then there was Quantum Martial Arts, which also seemed like it might be a cult, but this one at least seemed like a friendly and inclusive cult. One that might possibly be run by hippies, albeit violent ones. You know, quantum. I envisioned a sort of serene, death-dealing Deepak Chopra at the center of it all.

So I went, and instead I found Master Rachel Evans, who is, yes, expert at dealing out the unarmed kind of violence, but also the sweetest cult leader you ever heard tell a 6 year old “no” in absolutely no uncertain terms, without ever raising her voice or speaking harshly.

That’s the thing about Quantum: It’s a non-profit and it seems like most of the time and effort goes into teaching the school’s program to children and teens. Membership fees run on a sliding scale, and I suspect there are quite a few kids from low-income families in the Mission who are enrolled for nothing, or next to it. I wish to God that I’d had something like this in my life as a kid. I wonder how I’d have turned out if I had.

The school was founded in Seattle, and now has chapters in San Francisco and Portland. The curriculum is mostly Taekwondo at the beginner level, and many of the school’s rituals are drawn from the Korean martial arts tradition. The intermediate stuff seems to be more Wing Chun and (I think) Hapkido, and the advanced training is, I guess, Jeet Kun Do. I wouldn’t know. I still haven’t made it past yellow belt.

Well, it makes sense. I wouldn’t presume to guess at Master Evans’s actual size, because she is one of those people whose personality makes her out to be larger than she actually is. But like Bruce Lee, her martial arts style leans into the natural fighting advantages afforded to smaller people, namely, speed and agility.

I have neither. I am 6’2” and my BMI is, ahem, “overweight.” My athletic gifts, such as they are, are reach and brute force. Why am I training in a style that counterweights my natural advantages? Good question. I could say that it benefits me as a fighter not to lean too heavily on my physical gifts, but, honestly, I just like the school.

I could give a lot of reasons as to why. Quantum Martial Arts is a school that teaches unarmed combat, but there is nothing at all macho about it. We don’t participate in competitions. The emphasis is, first and foremost, on self-defense.

Accordingly, the environment is as welcoming as you could imagine. I have seen people of all ages, ethnicities, genders, et cetera, taken in with open arms. You want to come sweat on the mat with us? Just take your shoes off and bow before you step in.

If anything, Master Evans models and places a premium on an elevated kind of politeness. She addresses her students as “ma’am” and “sir” and “mister” and “mz”, and the result is that we wind up doing the same with each other. It’s very earnest but, honestly, really nice. Refreshing, even.

The adult classes are about half conditioning — yoga and calisthenics and so on — and about half martial arts training as such. About halfway through the calisthenics part, there is a moment where the class is asked to rest on our backs on the ground, holding our legs in mid-air, with our hands on our bellies, and recite after the instructor the “tenets of the martial arts,” which are: Courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, and indomitable spirit.

Only, of course, we don’t recite them. We shout them, and joyfully. Especially that last syllable in “spir-iiiiiiit!” What can I say. The earnestness is real and it’s infectious.

But there’s nothing soft about it. Underneath the velvet is hard steel. These classes kicked my ass. Sometimes I hated them. Hated how hard they were. Hated how uncoordinated I am and how little balance and core strength I had and how little proprioception I was gifted with.

Master Evans once told me, “I used to hate doing pushups. They were uncomfortable. They made me feel weak. Then one day I realized that doing pushups was the only way to get strong. And I wanted to be strong. Therefore, I wanted to do pushups. And, when I started thinking about it that way, I’ve been glad to do them ever since.”

Well, when I attended regularly, Quantum Martial Arts put me in probably the best shape of my life.

But, more than that, Quantum offered me a sense of belonging. I define belonging as that circumstance where your presence is welcomed and your absence is noted. I found that I belonged in the Quantum community. I was intensely proud when I earned my high white belt, and, eventually, my yellow belt.

I needed it in 2017 particularly, and 2018, after I’d made life choices and relationship choices that left me desperately, despondently unhappy. Quantum gave me a place to go, and something to do, when I was between jobs, depressed, and just really very badly loose at ends.

Well, I traveled quite a lot in 2018 and 2019, and my advancement in the school’s curriculum kind of stalled, but Master Evans and the more senior students always seemed to be glad to see me when I showed up. Then 2020 started, and we all know how that wound up.

Quantum started doing Zoom classes, but I couldn’t. Some of it was the utter existential dread of the pandemic, but a lot of it was that doing katas in my living room just didn’t have the same pull as going to a dojo at a specific time and training with other students.

But I kept paying membership dues, every month and every year. Even if I never set foot in the dojo, I continue to care passionately that something like Quantum Martial Arts exists. To teach anyone, but especially kids, how to be physically and mentally strong. To know how to defend themselves. To practice having good boundaries. To offer a community to belong to.

Fast forward a few years. Things are different now, in a bunch of ways. I moved to Portland last fall, and I determined that I would check out the local dojo. Some of the folks I used to train with in San Francisco had since moved up here, so it wouldn’t be like training with perfect strangers. The Quantum cell here, led by Mr. Bradley Lyons, found us an existing taekwondo school on SE Belmont with a master instructor approaching retirement, and worked out a timeshare arrangement for the space.

It’s easy to make excuses not to go, always. My mother passed away. My apartment is still all boxes with unpacked books and no bookshelves. The rush hour traffic in Portland is terrible. Thankfully Brad has been gently nudging me by email ever since I turned up at the new space to size things up. So I finally answered the call and attended the adult class last night.

Poor Mr. Lyons got a bit of a surprise when I showed up wearing my old high-white belt. I’d been hanging around Quantum for so many years that he just assumed I had earned a green belt. No, sir, and what’s more, I don’t remember any of the yellow belt curriculum, so it’s back to white belt for me until I get it back! Too bad. I think he was hoping for more intermediate students to leaven the mass of beginners at a dojo still just getting established in a new location.

But I did myself the favor of showing up, and I’m glad I did. The class was small, but the curriculum was still there, right where I’d left it, and even some of the old muscle memory. Running today was easier than it has been, probably because I spent so much of last night stretching.

Last night after class, I thanked Brad and said, “It’s really good to be back.” Even though I had, in some sense, never been there before.

But, in another sense, I never left. That’s the nice thing about belonging. You can always come back.

If you’re reading this, I send my love. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. See ya tomorrow… or, as my fellow martial artists cordially sign their emails, “Punch you later!”