The Thing You Fight, You Become

“The thing you fight, you become.”

There are moments in a piece of music, or any type of work, where one struggles - with years of fighting, drilling slowly, then fast, then angry, then desperate. And the harder one fights the tighter the hands become, until the very tension we were fighting takes up residence in the body. Krishnamurti put it in five words: the thing you fight, you become.

Also, even stage fright works the same way. You resist the nerves, clamp down on them, treat them as an enemy, to then be defeated before the downbeat. And the resistance itself is the trembling. The fight against fear is fear wearing a different coat. Musicians shake themselves apart trying to be calm, when the shaking was the trying.

It is counterintuitive for people whose training is built on effort. “Practice harder. Push through. Conquer the passage.” And much of the time that works at the mechanical layer. But there is a deeper layer where force backfires, where the muscle you tense to defeat the problem is the problem.

There comes a point where you stop making the difficult passage an enemy. Then there's a moment of observation, with breathing, with surrender and one plays it the way you would walk past a sleeping dog — alert, unhurried, without the adrenaline of combat. The tension drains not because of beating it but because of no longer resisting it. Krishnamurti was not offering a relaxation technique. He was describing a law.

There are still things that cannot be accomplished. But we have stopped going to war and trying to conquer them, and oddly, more of them have opened up since the laying down of weapons. The fight was never moving the needle. It was just making us into the thing we were fighting.

Reference: "Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

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