Mature Content! Making Friends In My New Neighborhood: So Who’s the ******* Here?

[KenpoEMT]

Sometimes you gotta fight fire with fire...sometimes.

 

[andy]

This will sound vague as ****
but I think the smartest thing you did was keep the experiance to ruminate on it. I probably would have lost my temper alot quicker but you still are tearing the moment down and rethinking it. To me that means you are still learning which also means you maybe have mastered yourself more then you may first have realised.

you walked away without hurting him, talked him down, talked yourself down, everybody applauds, Geez- I wish I could do that.

 

[Jonathan Randall]

But you made a bad choice. It's a bad choice particularly for you because you as a skilled fighter and martial-artist chose to get upset over the whole thing and get confrontational. The old adage goes violence begets violence. Letting someone know that they've upset you is one thing. Letting someone know what you think of them because they upset you is another. I don't mean to preach about what I think consitutes a martial artist but it is within my sphere of belief and experience that a true martial artist would not have reacted nor use the tools to spark a confrontation.

Perhaps not, but a true human very well may. I'd have slammed Tulisan if I hadn't just been in a similiar situation the other day. True, I did not react quite as belligerently, but I didn't walk away as quickly as I should have, either.

It's hard to deal with jerks, particularly if you've encountered several in a row during a given day. Thanks, Tulisan for posting this and admitting to critiques of your own behavior.

MACaver, your points are great, too. Life is hard and even the best among us are imperfect creatures but, like you wrote, we must recognize the consequences of "throwing down".

Valerian root, anyone?

 

[IWishToLearn]

Whenever I get confronted with somebody who is more interested in letting him/herself be heard than accomplishing anything, I just let them talk themselves out. Once that's done, then I try to help them learn a lesson my teacher taught me long ago that basically can be summed up as, "Listen without defending, speak without offending." Which in essence means, don't react to words defensively until you're sure of the context they are meant in. Don't jump to conclusions before understanding the situation and where the other person is coming from. (Except if the other person is obviously looking for a fight. Not a whole lot you can do there except defend yourself.) Speaking without offending means to find ways to say what you need to say without offending the other person...because someone who is offended will go on the defensive and won't REALLY listen to what you're saying. Anywho, my 2 cents, take them for what they are .