Partners – by Joseph Ninomiya

Through the course of this Covid-19 lockdown, something that has been floating through my
mind is the necessity of community and the very strange socio-cultural impacts that this ordeal
will have on it. As I thought about these things I began to dwell on the necessity of our partners
in martial arts. We have families in our gyms, our teams are our community. But it all starts
with just one partner; without that one “other” there is nothing. There is only so much martial
arts one can practice on their own and even so without the interaction of other people the
purpose of that practice, in a sense, becomes void.
Perhaps when this is all over, we will have a far greater and less superficial appreciation for
all of our “partners”. When our coaches tell us to switch partners, we will hopefully have a
more profound sense of gratitude that we are even able to do that. As stated, the most
important is that one “other”. It is in them that the world is open and we go from being “alone”
to being “together”. Something that even outside, or perhaps especially outside of the context
of martial arts we have all taken for granted. Perhaps now we can all take a minute to see who
we might have in our lives that is that partner to us?