Kung fu
I was watching a video of Rafael Nadal the other day when John McEnroe asked him to send the match ball to the VIP stand. Nadal barely seemed to think about it. He picked it up and sent it sailing across the court. It landed perfectly in McEnroe’s hand, almost as if he had given the ball written instructions on where to land.
I watched it twice.
There is always a certain appeal to someone doing something extraordinary in an ordinary way. They don't break a sweat; they’re in their stride, as though it cost them nothing — as though the thousand attempts and the many sleepless nights were not worth more than a dime.
Steph Curry has done this to me countless times. He will receive a basketball somewhere so far from the basket that, for most players, shooting from there should not even enter their consciousness. Then he shoots, and sometimes the ball seems to leave his hands already knowing where it is going.
Lionel Messi once stood over a free kick against Liverpool in the 2019 Champions League semi-final. He put the ball into a place the goalkeeper, Alisson Becker, could do almost nothing about. Four years earlier, he had made Jérôme Boateng fall like a mango tree with a movement so simple that it looked less like dribbling than removing a piece from a chessboard.
Roger Federer could hit a backhand that looked almost impolite in its elegance.
Cristiano Ronaldo once scored a bicycle kick against Juventus so beautiful that the opposing supporters applauded him. For a moment, tribalism recognised. You could support the other team and still be left in awe of what you had just witnessed.
Outside sport, Michelangelo looked at a block of marble and saw something buried inside it that nobody else could see. “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free,” he famously said.
Shakespeare took the same crude little collection of sounds available to all of us and made them large enough to contain kings, ghosts, jealousy, lust, murder, ambition and grief.
Beethoven took silence and put music inside it.
My childhood heroes were Nora Roberts, Og Mandino, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Adichie, Ola Rotimi, Buchi Emecheta and Wole Soyinka. They seemed to write about wars, colonialism, cultures, events and life’s tragedies, then hand them to me as worlds I could visualise and live inside simply by reading.
Mastery.
The weight of the word already feels as heavy as carrying a cross to Golgotha. It is what happens when you stay with something long enough for it to begin to reveal its secrets to you.
It is the altar where passion is worshipped; where devotion calls you out of slumber at midnight. It is wrestling with something all night, refusing to back down despite its obvious strength, wearing it down until the stronger thing finally gives in and blesses you with the gift of morning.
The kind of god-like intimacy that makes competence look like a rear-view mirror. The type that has you longing for something so deeply that you have intercourse with it again and again until you know every curve of it, whatever form its body takes.
It is the kind of intimacy only Father Time can produce.
In Marco Polo, Hundred Eyes described kung fu not merely as a fighting skill but as “supreme skill from hard work” — practice, preparation, endless repetition, until the mind is weary and the bones ache. That, he says, is how one acquires kung fu.
Malcolm Gladwell made a similar argument in Outliers — perhaps one of my favourite books of all time — with his famous 10,000-hour rule: the idea that extraordinary ability is rarely the product of talent alone, but of an enormous accumulation of practice, opportunity and time. He points to the Beatles playing endless hours in Hamburg and to figures like Bill Gates and Bill Joy, whose circumstances gave them unusually early and sustained access to their crafts.
Then I think of my mother’s Afang soup.
When you eat it, you realise few things on the human body preach how good life is for the living quite like the sense of taste.
You taste culinary skills moulded from clay: forged in the furnace of firewood and coal pots, from years of hunting for leaves and grinding peppers with bare hands, from years unended of cooking for the village square.
You taste the coming together of earth, water, air and fire, avatarised by a master herself. Even writing about it now, my mouth has become a stream where the memory of my tongue goes to drink. I am already drooling.
Get Oxwordz’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
That, too, is kung fu.
I have always wanted to reach kung fu at something.
I have always envied people who can focus on one thing, willingly suck at it for long enough to eventually become good at it. I have even more envy to throw at them for knowing what to focus on.
The curse of being a child who was good at many things is that you master none. You abandon one at the slightest inconvenience and pick up hobbies faster than you get yourself out of bed in the mornings.
It is not from a lack of passion. I have always been a passionate man — but excitement is the narcotic my passion feeds on.
I was passionate about Mathematics and Physics growing up; I became a teacher of both.
I became passionate about English, and now I have a track record of helping students, both locally and internationally, improve.
Rap, poetry and the drum set are among the things that held my passion until the excitement passed, although I always tend to attribute my abandonment of the latter to grief.
The grief of losing my father hammered the passion of writing into me. Already garnished with the skills of being an English tutor, I found myself unintentionally leaving people awestruck simply by writing out my thoughts.
Someone pointed out that I have written more about sadness than any other concept, and I could not help wondering whether that is why I still write — because there is no excitement to wane. Perhaps my writing skill is the company my misery loves.
Over time, I have discovered myself to be a pretty passionate lover, too: the kind whose loins ache from the mere possibility of whatever beauty my thoughts fancy. For the sake of morality, I will not admit how many books, excerpts, materials and techniques I have consumed — and continue to consume — in pursuit of mastering that craft. Perhaps because the excitement of this never wanes.
And you really should see me with football. I have been called obsessed, and although I hate the word, football is how the world makes sense to me. Everything is tactical if you can see it.
All this is to say: I do not want for passion.
I want for consistency.
I want for continuity long after the excitement of starting has waned.
Or perhaps I want for something in which the excitement never wanes.
Beyoncé’s I Was Here captures the life I want: to live a life where, after I am gone, generations will know my name.
I have never longed for generational wealth, only generational legacy.
I have many times opened a Physics textbook, seen the names Newton and Einstein, and thought: Good for you. Your names outlived even your posterity.
I want to fall in love with something so completely that I unknowingly develop the discipline to stay in love with it long enough to unearth its magic, and then have that magic outlive me.
To obsess over it to the point that it becomes second nature. So much that when people hear my name, they think about it before even thinking about me. So much that I talk to myself about it in my dreams and have conversations with an imaginary person in the seat next to me.
I do not want to be perfect; that is inherently impossible. I have always taken issue with the statement, “practice makes perfect.”
There is no such thing as perfection.
Practice makes kung fu.
