There is no spoon

I wish I had the vocabulary to explain exactly what happened to me tonight.

I broke a soup spoon.

Okay, more accurately, I wish I could explain what that meant.

I broke a spoon.

It was a Chinese ceramic soup spoon, generously donated by the Chinese restaurant at which we were celebrating my SiFu's birthday.

Now, normally you wouldn't think of the breaking of a ceramic soup spoon as a life-changing experience, but I'll be honest with you, the moment that spoon broke I felt something which very nearly borders on religious (and this is coming from a guy who not so long ago told off a pair of religious fanatics at his doorstep).

Maybe I should start from the beginning.

I try not to generalize if I can avoid it, but Kung Fu practicioners, as a general rule, like to break things; chopsticks, beer bottles, beer cans, rocks, soup spoons, you name it.

We like to break 'em with our bare hands, and it's not a matter of showing off, either. These often seem like parlor tricks (the beer-bottle break, in particular is something of a hoot at drinking parties, 'cause it looks really cool), but there's some genuine value to these breaks. Each one cultivates a certain type of movement, and requires a certain manipulation of ging.

So, after a couple of glasses of cognac (my SiFu likes cognac), the members of the school who were there started breaking things.

We started with the chopstick breaks, which are, believe it or not, a lot harder than they sound. The secret is to break the chopstick(s) without actually hitting anything. You hold them in your hand, and throw a punch with the hand holding the chopsticks into empty space, and the force of your punch breaks the chopsticks.

Like I said: a lot harder than it sounds.

So, after a bit, one of the elder students hands me a pair of chopsticks, and tells me in no uncertain terms: "SiFu says 'break.'"

"I've never broken two before," I told him, "on a good day, I can do one."

"You're thinking too hard," he tells me, "just do it."

Next thing I know, I'm holding two broken chopsticks in my hand.

This was to be the first of four tasks I would complete that night that I had never done before.

So we moved on a bit. Same senior student hands me a beer can. I didn't even know what to do with a beer can, much less how to do it.

He saw my confusion and said, "twist the can in half without letting go of the can."

"I have no clue how to do this."

"You don't have to. Just do it."

Two minutes later, I'm holding two halves of a beer can in my hands, and I'm wondering how the hell I managed to do that. And notwithstanding the small cuts I had in my fingertips from the sharp edges of the can, I was relatively unscathed.

Task number two.

About twenty minutes later, same senior student hands me a beer bottle. "SiFu says 'break,'" he tells me again.

This one, I'd seen people do, but I'd never even thought of doing it before that moment. It's a focused strike at the mouth of a beer bottle which, if done properly, causes the bottom of the bottle (and only the bottom) to break.

If done improperly, you end up with a handful of broken glass.

Here, I'm getting a little apprehensive, since I'm actually doing something where there's a small element of risk involved.

But, two minutes later, I'm looking through the mouth of a beer bottle whose bottom has been almost surgically excised. And I say that with no vanity involved. More shock, really.

Three down.

So, finally (after another glass of cognac), the senior student hands me a spoon.

So, just to recap, my list of casualties thus far is; two chopsticks, a beer can, two beer bottles (I did it again, just to convince myself that the first time wasn't a fluke), and now, they're handing me a spoon.

I'd never broken a spoon before. When I pointed this out to the senior student, he (quite rightly) observed that in the last couple of hours, I'd done no fewer than three things that I'd never done before.

I had to admit that he had a point.

So I hold the spoon in my left hand, and prepare to strike it with the edge of my right.

The senior student stopped me and shook his head. "One finger. Doing it with the whole hand is too easy."

I chose this moment to (respectfully) inform him that he had to be f*cking kidding.

Then he said something that I didn't quite understand the meaning of until last night: "if you don't hit it hard enough to break it, you're going to hurt yourself. If you don't know with every fiber of your being that that spoon is going to break, it won't, and all you'll have to show for it is a bruised finger."

So, I hit the spoon with the index finger of my right hand, I hear a loud snap and in my left hand, I'm suddenly holding a much shorter, significantly less useful spoon.

So, the next day, I'm looking at the ex spoon sitting on my desk, and asking myself how, exactly, I did all this stuff.

My first thought: it's a fluke, obviously. I got lucky.

So, I gather together a few beer bottles, I go to Chinatown and buy myself a few spoons (I didn't have the heart to tell the guy running the store what was going to happen to these spoons as he very carefully wrapped them in newspaper so that they wouldn't break) and some chopsticks, and I set about reproducing each event.

Two chopsticks, two beer bottles, and a soup spoon later, I'm about to stretch the number of broken soup spoons from two to three.

And I pulled back just a fraction. On a break I'd done twice before, I hesitated just a tiny bit.

And it hurt like a sonuvabitch.

Suffice it to say that the spoon, rather arrogantly, refused to break.

The point, which I admit that I was rather verbose getting to, is that the bruise now adorning my right index finger is not the result of the two spoons which I hit hard enough to break, it's the result of the one spoon I hit too softly. The one spoon I didn't put everything I had into hurt me more than the two I hit as hard as I could.

Now, I think there's a life lesson here. Not just about the breaking of ceramic spoons (which, while that would also be a life lesson, I think is probably one of the most useless life lessons in the history of mankind), but about life in general.

Approach life with everything that you've got, or what's the point?