Parents and their children used to spend a lot of time together. Most of the time, every day, for the last million years. Parents worked. Kids watched and learned and copied them. Parents taught. Kids learned.
Now of course, it’s different. The industrial revolution families split up. It embraced division of labor, making people mechanical, specialized, helpless and dependent. Dads disappeared from the family, moms were cooped up and the kids went off to school or to factory jobs of their own.
Earlier times were not all Eden. There was slavery and servitude, exploitation, invasion, famine, flood and superstition. But that is not all there was. In some times, in some places, for centuries, children and parents went out across the land to explore and learn, to cultivate and gather what they could to live on. Individually or in groups the children learned what their parents knew, things they had learned from their parents, practical knowledge that explained the world and taught people what they needed to know to stay alive, generation after generation, outside, in touch with the world.
It gave them their own map and compass; a will in a world that was alive in their hearts and minds. It was what you needed to know: where to find good things to eat, where to watch out for snakes, which plants are poisonous, which ones are medicine. The boys, when they were old enough, went out with their fathers and the other men to hunt and trap and fish. If that failed everyone would die in the winter. Nothing had to be said about the urgency of that mission. Every participant was important. No one was extra, no one was nobody. Along the way they learned how to track, how to move, and to be still; when to be silent, what to notice, and how act fast with skill and courage to win when the moment was right.
Nowadays parents have the same responsibility. But a different way of fulfilling it. The world now is as nourishing and as threatening as ever. For children there are pathways to be learned and poisons to be avoided. If children recognize what is good and what is poison, they can thrive. But they will not be able to do that without instruction and understanding, observation and shared experience. Which is a tall order. As the world now is flooded with toxins. More plentiful and more appealing than the hidden dangers of the natural world. And everyone is busy.
The landscape they will need to know now is more cultural than natural. Defined by human desire, not by the expanse of the plains, the heights of the mountains, the flow of the rivers, the motion of the wind, the heat of the fire, the cool of the forest or the way of the world.
The breakup of the family, and the race toward a technical solution to a perennial spiritual disease, has reduced the knowledge that can be passed down. The destructive forces have cast people adrift. The mutation of style and technology has given experience the appearance of obsolescence. The consequence of kids left alone to navigate the perils and poisons of culture, on their own, to the best of their ability, is showing.
The need for us to explore and examine our world is as urgent as it was when our ancestors were hunting and gathering. The need to distinguish nourishment from poison is as critical.
There are many people whose lives depend on us getting this right – in the dojo, in the world, at work, at home. As we can see from our training, everything we do counts.
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Post copyright © 2025 Jeffrey Brooks, MountainKarateNC.com, Yamabayashi Ryu, Mountain Karate Dojo, in the mountains of western NC.
Photo by Kevin Segura, via Unsplash
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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