Da Mystery of Shadowboxin'

In a little over thirty days, I will Pass Go on the thirty-third anniversary of my nativity—my Jesus year. I resist my inner old man telling kids to get off of his lawn, as oft as I can find the power within me. About a decade ago, Snapchat features that those slightly younger than me knew how to use, but I didn’t, elicited the inner old man. Because of Gary Vaynerchuk, I knew about Musical.ly before it was TikTok, and so I knew not to look down on it, as my mid to elder millennial peers were doing, for fear of being like those who doubted radio and television and the internet and now LLMs.

But watching my current batch of 6th graders shadowboxing matches daily has made me feel old anew. Shadowboxing, as I know it from Taekwondo, Western Boxing, and Thai Boxing, is practicing strikes on your own without a partner or a coach or a heavy bag. Little did I know (h/t to the incomparable folks behind knowyourmeme) that there is a game with this name, formerly called Ish Game or Pointing Game, rooted in 90s Japan and aughts Pacific Islander culture. A version of it even appeared in my favorite game of all time Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (SNES, 1996).

My students learned it organically from each other, but I suspect one of them picked it up from TikTok. One of my fears during the school closures of the Wuhan Flu, was that learning loss would include these hand-me-down games that are faithfully kept from generation to generation; as if they were the apostolic heirloom of the teaching of love.

I have spoken with several of my students to ascertain their house rules, and even encourage them to play during moments of free time. This type of rapport is what I find warms them up to me for when I have big asks of discipline and hard work. Though I ask them questions out of genuine pursuit of my curiosity, and with no other end goal in mind.

Here’s a paraphrase of their unified rules:

If you want to play shadowboxing, first you play rock-paper-scissors to see who goes first. One time. No best out of three. And you don’t go on shoot, you go on scissors.

One player points in a direction that they think the other player is headed in. The other player, simultaneously, tries to go in a direction that their adversary is not pointing toward. You are allowed to lose once. If you lose twice, you are out.

If any of this is unclear, please head over to Youtube and Instagram and TikTok to search: Shadowboxing game, Ish Game, and Pointing Game. See what the kids are up to. And reflect upon how sometimes something seems new, but there is nothing new under the Sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

This circle of life is more poignant to me this week, as I was reading Martin Heidegger (courtesy of his lover Hannah Arendt’s library), Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? He says, Zarathustra is fundamentally a teacher of the superman and the eternal recurrence (not far in its cyclicality from the view of time in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five or Hinduism), and that they are one and the same thing. Life is lived with and in opposition to suffering, part of which is the horror of first becoming who you are, or who you are supposed to be.

And, this surprised me (it has been eons since I sat down and read Nietzsche), the highest hope for Nietzsche, and “a rainbow after long storms”, is that man be delivered and rescued from revenge, and that “love alone shall have jurisdiction (creative love which forgets itself in its work).” This is exactly the sentiment I try my best to get across in all of my projects: podcasts (POAAS & Tewahido Bible Study), writings, and face-to-face events.

I have to read more. I have to read a lot more. Elsewhere, people have argued whether or not Nietzscheansim is compatible with Christ. You can decide for yourself. I like Riva’s version that promotes more walking—thus attacking heart disease, obesity, diabetes, high blood-pressure, and depression. At face-value, my answer is no, Christ and Nietzsche are not compatible. He started off the son of a Protestant pastor, and rebelled against that, still having signs of being in that bubble (hyperindividualism). But in the great dialectic, I think engaging with his ideas is a refining fire for Christianity to know and present itself better and better for this crooked generation.

Whatever your particular calling from God is, I can generally say,

work heartily, as serving the Lord and not men (Colossians 3:23)

in

faith working through love (Galatians 5:6)