I remember where I was when Elvis died, and Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. And Prince.
Those moments awaken us in the middle of our daydreams with the incomprehensible, the tragic. So it was Sunday, January 26th, 2020, when I learned of the tragic death of former Laker, Kobe Bryant, along with eight others, as their helicopter crashed into the fog-shrouded terrain of Calabasas, CA.
I’m not by nature a sports fan, but I’ve worked with sports teams and athletes in applying mindfulness skills to manage stress and optimize performance, and I was deeply affected by the sudden and horrific nature of the accident and the epic loss of innocent life. I was also deeply touched by the world’s public cries of loss and grief.
In the days that followed, I sat in my therapist’s chair across from several men who confessed many things: they’d lost a hero, and seemingly a part of themselves; they’d been shocked by their naivete’ in their unchecked belief that people like Kobe are safe from harm; that there was sometimes guilt for having not truly recognized how deeply his story affected them, and now it felt too late.
Many men also were struggling with how to express their feelings. They were unsure of what grief was, what it should look like, whether it was OK to share it with another guy beyond statements of shock or disbelief.
I shared with them what I myself had experienced directly that fateful Sunday, something which galvanized just what it might be to live in this in-between place of stability and insecurity.
On January 26th I was at a seminar along with about fifty others at the Inosanto Academy of Martial Arts, six hours of training with two amazing masters: kung fu phenom, Francis Fong, and the world-renowned Dan Inosanto, Bruce Lee’s best friend, training partner, and heir to Lee’s legacy of ideas about combat and self-actualization. At 84-years old, with a wry smile and radiant generosity, “Guro” Dan moved like a dancer and relayed the history of Filipino, Indonesian, and Malaysian martial arts like a scholar.
We were deep into the end of a training block, repeating drills to music, when the music stopped. We all turned towards Guro Dan to receive the next drill. Instead we saw he was on the phone, and assumed he turned the music down to take the call. We went back to doing our reps when soon he walked to the middle of the floor with tears in his eyes.
“Kobe Bryant just died in a helicopter accident. So we’re going to break and come back after lunch.” He couldn’t hold his gaze anywhere near us. Stunned, we walked to our gear and our phones to learn more.
At a somber lunch, we learned from a senior instructor that Guro Dan had known the Bryant family for years, and had even trained some of Kobe’s bodyguards in tactical self-defense. This loss was global, immediate, and for him, personal.
We returned to train for the second half of the seminar with Sifu Fong, Guro Dan nowhere to be seen. At the end of the seminar, as we broke to leave, I gathered my things and made my way to the exit. And there, on the driveway, sat Guro Dan in a lawn chair next to a student. He was silent, staring out into infinity, eyes moist, tears streaming down his cheeks.
My presence stirred him, and he bid me farewell, I paid my respects, and drove home.
It struck me, what had just transpired: Here was an enormously accomplished martial arts master, who could dispatch most assailants with his bare hands or with a rolled-up magazine, a man who is synonymous with lethality and discipline and embodied knowledge. And when he could have toughened up and shown a stoic face, launching into a lecture on how “death can come at any moment”, or could have retreated to his office to hide his emotions from his students, he instead chose to embody his authentic experience: his heart was breaking. And he not only wasn’t ashamed of it, he was willing to share it with all of us.
Each man with whom I shared that story in therapy seemed to take it in as a new possibility, a new archetype to model oneself around, and to nurture into their own unique expression. In the coming weeks, guided by each client’s own needs, we might explore how to rest with difficulty, how to sit in the fire of anger, how to be present with mortality, and how to open to joy.
That archetype, one we need for the 21st Century, for the Sixth Extinction Period, the Anthropocene, is the Soldier of Compassion: striving to blend dialectic qualities of being – strength and vulnerability, rest and action, aggression and tenderness – in an adaptive, creative, flexible process of becoming. It’s not a martial arts thing, or even a male or female thing. It’s a human thing – a demonstration of the range of emotion and connection that make a man or woman capable of responding to the beauty and terror of life with dignity, authenticity, resilience, and meaning.