“Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time” – Mike Tyson, 1987
No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces. – Prussian General Helmuth von Moltke, 1871
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”. – Supreme Allied Commander, WWII, US Army, President Dwight Eisenhower, 1957
Did he know the warfighting philosophy of General von Moltke or President Eisenhower when he was 20? Maybe he heard the idea from Cus D’amato, his trainer, adviser, and foster father. Eisenhower made that famous statement when D’amato was at the peak of his career, before he bucked the gang life and went into exile, opening a gym in Catskill, NY. Thirteen-year-old Mike Tyson, on a break from reform school, wandered in to check it out one. Cus might not have remembered the source of every piece of advice he offered, but he knew what was what. Whatever the case, by the time Mike said this he knew it from experience, like von Moltke and Eisenhower and D’amato.
It is a critical insight into action at any scale. At the bus stop, in the schoolyard, on the street corner, the battlefield, in tactics, strategy, logistics, communication, in the board room, barroom or gym, as you look ahead, predict, assess, plan, prepare events evolve. You do what you can with what you have, adjust, improvise, retreat, advance and carry on. We fight in the fog of war.
That can carry over into everything we do, if we don’t watch out. We never have perfect information. Something’s hidden. Something’s misunderstood. Something’s overlooked. We don’t know for sure what will emerge, or even what is. We do know that everything is changing, and that we are changing too.
In times of peace you can disengage. Instead of being laser focused on the opponent, in the heat of action, you can examine the terrain, the goals and the pathways. You can plan and take action. As things change we need to remember that everything is changing because conditions and causes are changing all around us and within us. Events may appear unpredictable, chaotic, even overwhelming, but they are not random and they are not meaningless.
Impermanence, mujo 無常in Japanese, is a characteristic of the way things are. Things appear when the conditions are right. They change as their context changes. They disappear as the causes and conditions that produced them cease. Nations and empires. Monuments and masterpieces. Champions and challengers. Worlds, stars, flowers, fireflies, ocean waves and drops of rain. Kata begin and end. Techniques transform and vanish. People come and go. Moments and lives, come and go, quickly. That is how it is. We are changing. We are creating the causes for that change, and getting the results of what we have done, all the time. In the ring, on the field, in our heart, in the world.
Bad things happen when we hold on to things that vanish. Good things come from virtue and courage, the causes for liberation.
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Post copyright © 2025 Jeffrey Brooks, MountainKarateNC.com, Yamabayashi Ryu, Mountain Karate Dojo, in the mountains of western NC.
Photo by Michael Lushington
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read True Karate Dō by Jeffrey Brooks
“One of the best books I’ve read in years, inviting and compelling. Jeff Brooks moves effortlessly from martial arts to Buddhism to consciousness studies, self-transformation, and related fields in this wide-ranging and Illuminating study that has much to offer both novice explorers and veteran practitioners. A splendid achievement.”— Philip Zaleski, Editor, The Best Spiritual Writing series