TRUE NORTH

"True North is the internal compass that guides you successfully through life. It represents who you are as a human being at your deepest level. It is your orienting point - your fixed point in a spinning world - that helps you stay on track as a leader. Your True North is based on what is most important to you, your most cherished values, your passions and motivations, the sources of satisfaction in your life." - Bill George, TRUE NORTH

It's a crazy world out there, and the sad truth is that good does not always triumph over evil, virtue often falls to vice, and the humble and steadfast tortoise often comes in second to the brash and arrogant hare. 

So what do we do with this information?

Throughout our lives, but especially when we are young, it is easy to let our external circumstances define us. We see the world, we see how it operates, and we operate according to those same principles. We allow the "way the world works" to become the way we work. But as we said, the world does not always operate in an admirable way, and by acting as its agent we become complicit in - if not overtly culpable for - those same machinations. 

But human transaction is a funny thing. Allow a certain behavior to occur repeatedly during conversations with another person - a certain kind of joke, a certain level of imposition - and that behavior grows to define the rules of exchange that you two share. But this rule of exchange is far from concrete! Assert a different rule - express a refusal to entertain that sort of joke, etc. - and the old rules are instantly destroyed, a new paradigm must be created.

This is not to say that this process may not be uncomfortable, even unpleasant. But to be unwilling to undertake this effort is to accept a life defined always by others. 

Which is easy enough. It is easy enough to let the world tell me how it operates, and fall in line. It is a more difficult thing to tell the world how I operate: what I will and won't tolerate, what I do and don't value, what I will and won't reward. 

This is not the same as saying that I expect the world to live by my rules. It is just to say that I can, at the very least, expect to live my own life by them. And herein lies the real meaning of True North: to live a life guided not by the sometimes questionable and perhaps shifting rules of my environment but by something else, something more essential.

When financial markets crumble, when loved ones die, when journeys end, when youth fades, when dictators rise to power, True North remains. 

So: hard work, dedication, consistency, temperance, compassion, efficiency, acceptance, calm, responsibility: every lesson in Jiu-Jitsu is a lesson in how to live in the world. This is not something other than the very nature of the thing itself: Jigoro Kano's primary mission in codifying his art was the perfection of man; Judo was always only a means to that end. He believed that, in creating an art that rewarded the principles of Jita Kyoei (mutual prosperity for self and others) and Seiryoku Zenyo (best use of one's energy), he might engender and nourish those virtues in practitioners: virtues which they would then take with them in their dealings in the world. The hope was that if enough people espoused these principles in their dealings, and defined their rules of exchange by them, the world would be transformed into a more compassionate and harmonious place. 

Now, when the world seems hellbent on sending itself into ever-more violent turmoil, this is more vital than ever. In a world chasing and rewarding the loud and the brash, eagerly engaging in the needless confrontation, confusing obstinance for strength and volume for vision, find your True North on the mats.  
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