February 1, 2008

I can hardly begin to write about the man I was introduced to last night. It would sound like complete fiction. Even I had trouble believing his story. But I could tell that he was being honest which usually means one of two things. Either he’s been completely brain washed into believing that he’s experienced something he hasn’t, or he’s telling the truth. And don’t get me wrong, people checked him. There were men there far more interested than me in finding him out. But his story was tight, it certainly didn’t look rehearsed. His body language was clean, he didn’t blink heavily, didn’t talk too quickly, he looked up and to the left for recall and down for emotion. He also looked the part. He came with four classic-looking agent types. Small men, stocky, with zero personality and less than zero facial features. Tough guys with repltilian brains just perfect for field work. The sort of men with so little going on personality-wise that they just faded into crowds. Men you would never notice, never look twice at, never remember, never see coming. They were body guards and friends from what I could tell. They were all in the protection racket. Towards the end of the evening I even got talking with one of them at the corner table of the restaurant we were at. He told me he was head-hunted when he left Spetsnaz. He even invited me to one of their sparring sessions where they do a shorthand cock and balls version of Aikido. The bone crunching art. The way the body’s limbs aren’t supposed to bend, the weak angles and how to exploit them. His friend was also involved in systems theory on a soldier level. A theory that states that everything in nature, without exception, has a moment in which it can evolve beyond itself, in which it has the possibility to make a quantum leap in evolution and become something far stronger, far more powerful than it was previously. The catch being that for it to take place a moment of chaos must be undergone, a moment in which all the components that make up the system must be broken down so they can be rearranged into a more evolved configuration. A moment in which the system becomes temporarily weaker than it was when it began. The - it has to get worse before it gets better - formula. And every system in nature understands this except for one. Us. Because he said that of all of them we are the only ones who not only attempt to drag our heels through it, but actively attempt to stop it. For the simple reason that we are so short sighted we cannot see past the moment of chaos, the moment of weakness, to the rewards beyond it. As if the caterpillar was so frightened of becoming sludge, that it remained a worm, and never broke itself down so that it could learn how to fly. And its the same with everything, he said. Because to truly train a man he must be broken. Indeed the best break themselves. They go into what they fear the most, until they get to a point where they will do anything not to go on. Where they are willing even to take their own lives to stop from going on. And then they do. And in that moment overcome their own psyche. Because they have proven that they are stronger than it. Because they have conquered it.