Goals and Interests in HEMA

I've been thinking lately about HEMA goals and interests.

Ultimately, the goal of any hobby is just to have fun. But what makes fencing fun? What brings people in the door at a fencing club the first time? What makes them stay? And what can we learn about the community from thinking about this?

Early Interests and Goals

Here is a sample list of some of the reasons I've seen people start fencing:

• Swords and fencing are cool - "I wanna learn to do that!!";
• Blowing off stress through athletics / fencing is a fun workout;
• Competition is fun;
• Having a community of people one sees a few times per week; potentially making friends in that community;
• Wanting to learn a martial art;
• Having a hobby that involves a long progression of skill / high "skill ceiling";
• "Character development" - learning to do something difficult (often found along with wanting a hobby with a long progression of skill);
• Wanting to engage with history (and sometimes engage with a particular history, e.g. a Spanish person wanting to learn historical Spanish fencing as part of an appreciation for Spanish culture); and
• The bookish side of things seems neat or the person is familiar with the idea of historical fencing already, but wants to explore how the ideas were applied. 

There's probably a few I haven't thought of or seen, too. And obviously, these goals can overlap. 

For those of us who organize and/or run fencing clubs, being able to provide these things to new club members is key to getting them to join. Making decisions about which you want to focus on is also important in shaping what kind of club you create, as well. And all of these seem like great reasons to me to get involved in HEMA. I don't think any one of them is better or more respectable than any other. 

Medium- and Long-Term Interests and Goals

What gets people to stay in fencing because they still find it fun may be different though. ​I think there are certain second-order goals that eventually coalesce for people after they've been at it for a while. 

Here are some sample goals I have seen experienced people hold:

• Competition-minded fencers might seek to win competitions, or simply get good enough to hold their own against a particular individual who is a good fencer;
• People who enjoy helping others improve often eventually realize they enjoy not just giving pointers, but actually coaching and teaching, which is a somewhat different role than simply being friendly and experienced;
• Instructors and certain highly source-minded fencers might strive to reconstruct, replicate, and embody/exemplify one or more particular fencing style(s);
• Community-minded types might want to not just be part of a fun community of friends, but actually foster and create one;
• Scholarly types might want to learn, interpret, and understand as many different fencing sources as possible so they can "stand over" a whole bunch of different styles, compare and contrast them, and use that knowledge to fence better or teach others;
• Bilingual or multi-lingual scholars might want to create new translations of fencing sources or help others who don't have their language skills understand the sources better;
• Fitness-minded fencers might want to achieve a level of peak fitness that makes them able to do just about anything the hobby calls for; and
• Researchers might want to contribute original research, articles, and/or books to the hobby.

As above, these goals can overlap. 

My List

I started thinking about this purely for selfish reasons. "What are my goals, and how can I communicate them," I thought. With that in mind:

I pretty much like all the first-order goals - with the exception of competition, if I'm honest. It taps into elements of my personality that I think aren't healthy. I am very much about building a high level of skill, and want to be able to perform under pressure, but I find I get more learning and skill growth when not dealing with nerves. So, inasmuch as I do it, I do it to try to master those parts of who I am, and to learn something about competition so that if someone comes to me looking for guidance on competition, I can help them. 

My second-order goals are where I have to start picking and choosing.

• First and maybe foremost, I strive to strictly reconstruct, replicate, and embody any fencing source I'm working from. This has mostly been Liechtenauer, but right as the COVID-19 lockdowns hit I was just starting to explore a bunch of other stuff. 
• I like to read, and I like to write. Inasmuch as this puts me in a position to contribute on the research and scholarship side of things, I want to do this too.
• I really enjoy helping others learn fencing, and try to become a better teacher/coach.

As above, I don't particularly enjoy the experience of competition. I don't imagine I'll set my sights on winning any - and it's not a "Not with that attitude!" kind of thing. There's motivational factors, probably, but I also don't have a club situation that would allow for it.

I like trying to create communities to help people learn, but I also don't feel like I have to be in charge of one and do everything "my way." If someone created a community that I thought was good, I'd be happy to join it.

I like the idea of practicing a wide number of fencing sources in theory, but in practice I find my interests keep drawing me back to a handful of sources and questions about their origin and context. These are mostly Medieval. 17th century rapier is a secondary interest. I basically don't care about anything 18th century and later, even if smallswords are cool.

I've learned a little German, and will continue working on it. This may never develop to the point that I can translate anything, but I guess we'll see.

I love feeling generally fit, but I'm not committed enough to be Ties Kool. I basically just want to be fit enough to do all the physical things I want to do.

All these goals may not all interlock well, but they feel good and make me happy. I suspect everyone has a list of their own goals, whether they realize it or not. If you have similar goals as me, you might enjoy this blog. 

Thinking About the Lists

The selfish exercise of thinking about my own goals done, there's a few more things that strike me about the lists. 

There's actually no particular need to take on any of these second-order goals after you've been fencing for a couple of years. Experienced fencers can quite easily carry on just fencing for fun, enjoying the company of their clubmates, and refining their skills.

But often, that's not what happens. Many people feel intuitively drawn to some of these second-order goals, sometimes without even realizing it. Inasmuch as this happens, I think it's worth thinking about how goals shape our behavior. 

1. Some goals synergize better with each other than others:

• Becoming a high-level competitor and becoming extremely physically fit synergize well together. These goals can be helped by pursuing scholarly work, and indeed few high-level competitors in historical fencing simply do not read sources. But there are also differences of scale - a top competitor does not necessarily have to be able to extemporaneously provide a compare/contrast between different fencing systems across a 300 year period, for example;
• Conversely, research and scholarly pursuits synergize well with translation work, but can take time away from physical training goals like fitness and competition.
• Fostering a community is a highly "meta" skillset, because it requires both organizational and administrative capability and a number of the other skillsets such as teaching and coaching, reading and scholarship, etc.

Why does this matter? Simply because unless you happen to be independently wealthy, you probably do not have enough free time to be able to pursue all the goals you would like to, and you have to make decisions about what to focus on. 

2. Inasmuch as people assume second-order goals, those goals shape the kinds of communities they need in order to keeping having fun in the hobby. 

The community is big enough for there to be sub-communities of interest. Finding people who share your interests and find the same things fun is an important way to keep sane when dealing with the self-applied pressure of trying to meet your own goals. We all want to find our "gang" within the community, and there is a degree to which it's normal and natural to want people to share our priorities, because that's how we find our gang. 

But conversely, I think this can be taken too far. Trying to convince other people that they "should" share your interests when they actually don't is a recipe for frustration, and also potentially a dick move if you persist after being rebuffed. It also mostly doesn't work. Similarly, trying to convince other people that they "should not" be interested in something that they enjoy is also a recipe for frustration, and also kind of a dick move. 

3. I observe that the list of second-order goals has a somewhat different "character" than the first list. These goals feel - to me, at least - like they are harder to ever truly attain, because there is seldom the kind of discrete feedback that lets you know you've met the goal. 

Instead, the metric of "success" shifts: A coach can always try to come up with clever new ways to teach something. Researchers are perpetually beset by doubts that there is some piece of knowledge they have missed. And even for competitors who want to prove themselves the most skilled, a relatively discrete goal like winning a particular competition can sometimes be deceptively hard to evaluate, because what if that one particular person you wanted to test yourself against got hurt two weeks before the competition, and didn't compete? Is your victory worth as much? 

So, the "work" never really stops. One can devote a lifetime to any one, or several, of these goals. Consciously understanding what one's own goals are, and finding a community of people who help you with them, is an important preventative to stop burnout and frustration. 

4. Something else worth noting about the second list is that with the exception of winning fencing competitions, these goals are no longer the central, physical act of fencing - they're actually about things adjacent to the practice of fencing - the knowledge, culture, environment, and assumptions that underlie the practice.

I suspect that this is part what underlies some of the "conflicts" or "disagreements" within the hobby: Differing visions of what the "best" goals are. 

One example of this can be found in the discussion over the practice of test cutting. Since roughly 2008-2010 or so, some practitioners have come to feel that the practice of test cutting is an important fundamental skill to develop when training with edged weapons. (This includes myself.) Other practitioners question its value. 

Another example can be found in discussions over the practice of holding tournaments, what the rules can or should be, and the relative value of sportive success within tournaments. Some rulesets aim to incentivize certain behaviors, but not others. These in turn are often shaped by assumptions, arguments, and beliefs about what kinds of fencing behavior should be incentivized under the rules. 

Many of these arguments often return to what one might call "philosophical" questions - whether the "goal/interest" behind a point of view is a valid one. 

I think this is also tied into the thought above about "finding one's gang" - at some level, we want others to endorse our goals as good goals. We want others not just accept that we're doing our thing and that's, like, fine I guess - we want them to not just tolerate our goals, but endorse them.

That is a different mentality than "live-and-let-live." 

Conclusions

What does all this mean? I guess it's up to each of us to figure that out. 

For myself, even if I don't think "shaming" others for having goals I don't like is the right way to get them to adopt my goals, one thing we can do to grow a sub-community of interest is try to make it visible, clear in mission, welcoming, and easy to join. 

With that in mind, I see it as a good thing when someone makes it clear that they are explicitly focused on developing competition skill, building an understanding of history, or whatever their interest is - do not lecture them that they should not care about their interests. They are not talking to you - they're talking to others who might be interested.

And so, one of the things I am trying to do with this piece, and this blog in general, is to articulate my goals so that others can share them, and try to make it easier to share those goals.