Controlled aggression
This relates back to what I said about anger.
There's a chapter in Robert Greene's Laws of Human Nature on owning aggression. I somehow find it insightful so I wonder why.
Incidentally I've been on a quest to use video games as a vehicle to know the self. Street Fighter is still a big part of that, and there's been some recent findings.
But first, an old story. There was a six year-old kid in kindergarten. It was his only year in kindergarten and it was made eventful through his sheer personality.
One day in class, he came back to the classroom and found his water bottle gone. Someone pointed to a girl as the culprit. He walked up to that girl and asked her for the bottle. Before she can even answer, he landed a punch on her mouth, breaking her tooth and she bled right away.
He went back to his seat in terror, waiting for the inevitable while the class looked at the girl crying helplessly. The teacher arrived, found out what happened, grabbed this boy to the front of the class, gave him a slap or two, tied his hands, took a large pair of scissors with jagged edges and threatened to cut his fingers off as punishment.
He spent the rest of the day standing at the corner of the class crying over the jagged scissors.
For the rest of the year, similar incidents happened again for two more times (over slightly different trigger events).
That boy was me.
By then it's pretty clear there's some unhinged beast that needed control. So I promised this is not going to repeat itself.
As a result, all sense of aggression ended up suppressed without much outlet of expression the years. It's very possible that it's been over-corrected to the point of timidness.
Back to Street Fighter. There's this rank ceiling I simply couldn't break. For a long time, I thought it's about certain skills I'm missing.
And then a pattern emerged recently: I stopped losing when I gain a sense of aggression.
A kind of energy to pile on the offensive relentlessly. Once I muster up the offensive, the game started to become slower and I could observe the opponent reacting to me. Now I'm in control and not reacting.
This not quite the same energy as anger though it can look similar.
I suspect such aggression done naively can only take the game so far but it's not nothing. Perhaps it's simply a rocket fuel for the psyche, steering it is something else.
Aggression would be easy to be tipped over the edge by better players, at which point it turns into self-directed anger.
The trick is gaining the calm aggression. To be able to calculate at the same time, to see the Matrix and maintain composure.
Controlled-aggression: that's the next frontier of inner game. What I do want to know next isn't how to control but to conjure this demon on demand.