Boxing rings

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Boxing rings

I’m starting a paper about the territoriality of sacred space.  It got me to thinking about boxing rings.  We enter them to do combat, and yet with all the trappings and rituals of a religious rite.  We wear sanctified garments, observe specific intervals for actual fighting, and even as we fight, we observe rules.  We fight a “clean” fight, so as not to do permanent harm.  We touch gloves at the beginning of the rounds and often embrace at the end.  Thus each fighter is mindful of his or her place in the pomp and circumstance of the experience.   It seems that the boundaries of the ring are what creates that sense of its being a special place.  Look at fighters before a fight and at what happens to them once they are in the ring.  They are no less eager to win, but the form counts for what fighters do and how they feel about themselves as they box.  Just think of our horror when Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear.  The act not only broke the rules of the fight, but some fundamental agreement on the boundaries of the ring.  Certainly one can fight a tough fight, but again, the ultimate idea is that the ring equates to a ritualized process.  Biting someone’s ear broke that covenant, just as loading someone’s gloves with weights or even badly mis-matching a fight breaks that boundary.

Boxing everybody

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Boxing everybody

Ever feel as if you are just boxing everybody?  As if every single thing is a fight?  Spouse, kid, your body, folks on the street, the subway, the job, the “yuck” that comes across as news or mind movies at 2:30 in the morning?

And it’s not even a matter of its being one of those days.  Rather, it is a state of mind.  Active, alert, and punchy; always ready for the counter punch; for the stick and jab, for how one seemingly has to move from zero-to-sixty all the time.

My whole life is like that lately.  Somebody is always in high drama mode around me.  Spilled milk becomes an exercise in life at defcon four – and I think to myself, imagine if there was a real problem.

I’m boxing my past too.  The flutter of memories and stories and things that did not happen that comes with losing a parent.  Only one can’t box the dead.  And really not the living either.  It just is.

What the gym gives you

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What the gym gives you

The first day is always the hardest.

You’ve made the resolve to do something. To work out. To take yourself where you want to go even if you’ve never worked out before. And what’s getting you there is your resolve. Your first step on your journey to affirming yourself.

My first step was into Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn, New York. I was 42 years old and had recently undergone 8 1/2 hours of neurosurgery on the nerves that fed my right shoulder and arm. I wanted to feel strong again and let a lifetime’s worth of fascination with the “sweet science” propel me over the threshold.

Gleason’s is the quintessential boxer’s gym. I took in the gym smells, heavy bags being pounded, men and women pummeling each other in the ring, the “da-da-da da-da-da” of the speed bags and found it all scary, daunting and in the end quite exhilarating.

While your gym might not be a gym as steeped in boxing lore as Gleason’s — that first moment is no less daunting. The people you meet in the gym have all arrived before you. You watch them going through their routines and think, I’ll never be that good. And then it clicks in. You are there. You’re there to work. You’ve crossed the divide and staked your claim on what it is you want to try for yourself.

And that’s the thing. There is no judge and jury. There is just you and the hard work you bring to what you do. Each workout is as challenging and unique as you are. And if you miss a day, a week, or a year, that’s part of the challenge too. What you learn is that the challenges are no less mental than they are physical.

Don’t kid yourself either; the challenges for women are particularly unique. We’re trained from childhood precisely not to hit things. In my own experience, the first time I hit someone in the ring I started to cry. That’s how hard it was to break through my own barriers. And it was not much different on the bag.

What you have to remember is that there is something in you that wants to work it out on the bag. That wants to test out your physical stamina and mental resources.

And what has propelled you in the first place is the beginning point to a brand new world. You are a boxer now. And a woman boxer at that. And wherever you go in the world, you can walk into a boxing gym, stick out your fist in a boxer’s salute, and work out with the best of them.

Congratulations, you have arrived.