After an altercation, I heard the above comment from someone at the scene. It was used to explain why the situation escalated beyond what would have been necessary. It was an excuse (not that excuses should always be discounted), not an explanation. Do things get out of control or do things just change in unpredicted or unanticipated ways? Note there’s a difference in the words I just used. Predicting is more of a sense of what will happen, while anticipating is waiting for something that has a strong possibility of happening. Ideally, everything would be anticipated, what may not would at least be predicted.

As with most of life, something evolves that was neither anticipated nor predicted. Events and those in them were “out of control.” Hearing this makes me think that at least one participant didn’t fare well, and it’s usually the defender because he or she wasn’t able to either react or change attack methods once control dropped into the toilet. Threats can be both anticipated (you expect that a person is intending harm) and predicted (you find yourself in a position where the presence of a threat is likely). What’s important is the ability to adapt to changing conditions while continuing to use force (as needed) to either maintain your own control of those conditions – or to annihilate the threat to eliminate the situation entirely.

You want to be the one who appears, to the threat, to have lost control but in fact you are completely in control. I know this is a rather circular statement as I really can’t explain it as well as I would like. Miyamoto Musashi does much better, of course. “In fighting and everyday life, you should be determined through calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased. An elevated spirit is weak and a low spirit is weak. Do not let the enemy see your spirit.” Difficult? Absolutely. Emotions will always attempt to rise up in the midst of something most of us do not particularly want to encounter, so by considering what may occur and deciding in advance that being determined and calm will be your strategy, you will have already made yourself ready for your reaction. That reaction should then be action coming from training, learning and preparing yourself to deal with whatever confronts you.

It will be that ‘settled spirit’ that keeps you in control within your own mind. The threat can see whatever you choose to show – if the threat is seeing a rabid wolf instead of a meek sheep, it’s possible the threat will leave and you have won the fight without fighting. If the threat’s actions escalate the encounter to the point where a fight is imminent, I’d rather fight as a rabid, vicious wolf (while remaining internally calm and determined) than to just let things get out of control. I’m betting that the wounded sheep would bleat how things got out of control, but the wolf would win the fight and kill the threat. As always, you absolutely do have free will and it is your choice alone. No one can make you be a sheep. I choose to be a wolf.