“Live your life in such a way that you’ll be remembered for your
kindness, compassion, fairness, character, benevolence, and a force for
good who had much respect for life, in general.” – Germany Kent
Benevolence is essentially defined as having good will towards others. Why is it important for people like us to be benevolent? To balance to the inherent violence in our training. We do not want to be violent. We know the damage that we can cause and we know that whatever we do, we will have to live with the consequences of those actions the rest of our lives. The same goes for how we act towards others in general. Have you ever been angry towards someone and then later felt bad about it and things between you were never the same? I have and it’s not a fun thing to live with, no matter what you do to make up for it.
What we do towards someone, whether in the way we treat them or in defending ourselves against them can have permanent effects. It is better to befriend an enemy than defeat them, for in defeat, they will rise to conquer again and again. In friendship, you both rise. I frankly don’t remember who said that, for all I know, I made it up, but the point being that we must always strive to not have to inflict violence unless absolutely necessary. Even the Royal SAS, arguably the best special operations team in the world and perhaps the deadliest, have in their self Defense training the 4 Ds: Dialogue, Direct, Debrief and Document. During the debriefing, after you have had to use your skills, you offer the person help, medical or otherwise. This goes as long way towards disarming the person after the fact. Plus, it shows any onlookers that you didn’t intend to harm this person, you only did what had to be done to stop them from hurting you.
When we act with kindness and care towards others, it causes them to have to rethink their response towards you. It also gives you time to decide if the person is still a threat and plan your response in a self defense situation.
Few people that I am aware of enjoy being treated badly. I’m sure that you are not one of them. If you want others to give you the benevolence you deserve, return it in kind.
Train hard,
-Head Instructor Shawn Morris