Memoirs of a martial artist (First memory)

- If one punches with anger, his mind is dangerously sick. For this we must seek love in martial arts, love is fluid like smoke, it moves everywhere and in every direction. Only if love is the object of your mind your body becomes fluid. In anger, fear and in hatred body is rigid, hart. Love is energy, if you have love you have energy, an inexhaustible source of energy. After fifty years of age body needs elasticity and fluidity. Everyone love himself. Who does not love himself? Maybe a few...usually people love themselves, their ego. A martial artist must look inside and seek for love.

The day I arrived in Vilnius my goal was to find a new martial art. The search for it took eleven months. Until I met The Master.
After moving to Vilnius I learned many things. A new reality. New people, new culture. New mentality. New colours , new flavours, new smells...a different world from the world I was coming from.
But, the most important thing I learned was one truth I discovered about Vilnius in a book written by a Lithuanian author, Kristina Sabaliauskaitė.
In Lithuanian it sounded like this "Niekas šiame mieste nėra tai, kas  gali pasirodyti iš pirmo žvilgsnio".
It is important to quote it in the original kalba, language. Because you maybe realize the strange and incomprehensible sound that stroke me when I read it. Because that truth, hidden and unknown up to that moment, smogė, hit me, in the face with the gravity of its brutality.
"Nothing in this city may be what it seems at first glance". Yes, this flat translation into a language that was known to me and which, however, was not my mother tongue let me understand the meaning of that displacing sentence. But it had no impact on me.
A sort of tromp-l'oeil sentence was that sentence, in the original tongue.

- Martial arts an love are inextricably linked - was another sentence of The Master.

I was not looking for love when I arrived, I had love. I was in love. I came to Vilnius for love. Yes, I had love, as an object in front of a subject. As I in front of me. As myself between I and me.
Or at least I was not looking for the love The Master spoke.

(to be continued)