I was recently asked to share my experience of being in a mentor – protégé relationship.

Never had one. Good…

So I’m pulling this out of thin air.

Fortunately, humans are very good at pulling things out of thin air. We’re like magicians pulling the rabbits out of hats, cards from our hands, coins from behind each other’s ears —like little glints of potential you never even knew you had — until… Ta-dah!

However, because we’re reasonable, rational, responsible adults we know that magic is just an act of perception.

And yet… if we are lucky enough we will allow ourselves to feel that enjoyment of having a little more awe and wonder than before.

So to warm up, here are 3 examples of how changing our perception can help us change our understanding of thin air.

Example 1. There are communities in Chile who have poor access to drinking water. But they do have a lot of fog. You’ve probably seen how droplets collect on a spider’s web? These communities created fog-harvesting nets to collect this drinkable water. That’s survival, out of thin air.

Example 2. In 2015 a man spent 100 days in Beijing collecting smog from the air, and compressed the dust into a brick. Let’s take that as proof of concept.

And so, example 3, in 2016 a chemist from George Washington University developed an industrial method for extracting carbon from thin air, compressing it into bricks… and diamonds.

OK. So, if we can conjure rabbits and cards and coins, and awe and wonder and enjoyment, and water to drink, and bricks to build, and diamonds to adorn our housed and hydrated bodies, well then yes, we can find some mentors too.

Now, mentorship, does not have to come from a person, it can come from a practice. And so, here are 3 ways in which the practice of martial arts has been a mentor to me: through feedback, support, and wisdom.

Firstly, feedback: I can tell you right now how to become a boxing world champion, ready?

Hit, and don’t get hit. Simple? Yes. Easy?… n.o.p.e.

In this way, martial arts provides you with immediate and direct feedback. It lets you know if your action hit the target, fell short, or over reached. Or if, on the other hand, your target hit you and sent you flying through … thin air.

In which case, fear not, because martial arts then provides you with the second aspect of mentorship: support. Because whether you are flying or falling, eventually * the floor * will be there to meet you.

Visceral (and survivable) feedback & support, allows for iteration, and through iteration, adaptation.

And if you do this enough, martial arts will provide you with the third aspect of mentorship: wisdom.

There’s a phrase you might have heard:

“Knowledge is only rumour until it lives in the body.”

For example, you can know you need to clean your teeth; if you do it, you’re wise, and the action lives in your body. If you know it and don’t do it, you’re… not so wise…, and things start dying in your body.

So, martial arts taught me to condition my mind and body so the knowledge can express itself through me as wisdom, without my ego getting in the way (…as much… we’re always a work in progress…). It invites me to become the best collaborator I can be for the practice with which I’m engaged. Which includes doing hard things when I can, so I can do hard things when I must.

Because, as we know, pain also offers its own wisdom. And through the malpractice of martial arts, I developed a neurological condition called trigeminal neuralgia. This is intensely painful, where every nerve running through one side of your head is on. You could imagine here the worst dental pain possible through every.single.tooth. Jaw bones. Cheek. Eye. Forehead. It’s… quite something. Which was my body telling me its wisdom in no uncertain terms: improve your nutrition, your rest, and for goodness sake improve your skillset. Because, note to the brave but not so wise: hits to the head – not so good for you.

Wisdom.

Humility.

Compassion.

The writer Elizabeth Gilbert (who you might know through her work Eat, Pray, Love; Big Magic; or her TED talks), describes a soulmate as someone who comes into your life to bring you to your own attention so you can change what you need to change. It’s painful. And it’s necessary. Martial arts was like a soulmate to me, in some ways like a mentor, bringing me to my own attention so I could change. Through feedback, support, and wisdom.

So, if the mentors we need are all around us, waiting for us to use the magic of our perception to conjure them from thin air, if there was a way you could look at the world a little bit differently today, I wonder what you might see? What might be there right next to you right now that’s just waiting for you to realise its potential, your potential?

Thanks for reading. If this has been helpful to you then feel free to let me know. And if you found it interesting then please feel free to share it so other people can find and enjoy it too.

(Originally published on Medium in 2020 https://medium.com/@eveparmiter/thin-air-what-to-do-when-you-dont-have-a-mentor-156748c2f4b5)

Image credit ‘water in web’ by Klive Rapp