Permission to Travel

Permission to Travel

One of the strangest things I have noticed over the years is not how different people’s Jiu Jitsu looks, but how similar their thinking is.

No matter where I go, most people seem to be playing the same game. Move fast. Never settle. Escape immediately. Chase the next position. Chase the next submission. Chase the win. If you stop moving, you must be losing.

Almost no one ever asks where that belief came from.

It is not that these people are lazy or unskilled. Many of them are strong, disciplined, and extremely effective at what they do. But what surprises me is how few ever question the structure of the world they have been given. They live inside a narrow map and mistake it for the whole country.

Sport Jiu Jitsu rewards urgency. It rewards specialization. It rewards being very sharp in a very small space. There is nothing wrong with that. But when that becomes the only lens through which someone sees the art, their relationship with Jiu Jitsu quietly shrinks.

They become a person who lives their entire life in one town.

That town may be impressive. It may be fast. It may even be famous. But it is still just one town.

Loving Jiu Jitsu for the art instead of the outcome gives you permission to travel.

It gives you permission to stay in bad positions without panic. To walk instead of sprint. To feel rather than force. To spend months in places most people abandon in seconds. And over time, something changes. You stop being a tourist in the positions and you become a native.

You learn where the valleys are. You learn where the water runs after the rain. You learn which paths flood, which stay dry, which look safe and are not. You find the small, quiet places that never show up on the highlight reel. The hidden swimming holes. The locals only restaurants. The places that are never crowded because no one is in a hurry to get there.

That is what mastery actually starts to resemble.

Not dominance. Familiarity.

Most people are trained to collect postcards. They fly into a position, take a quick picture, then rush off to the next one. Over and over. Years go by. They have seen everything and understood almost nothing.

The deeper beauty of Jiu Jitsu only reveals itself to people who move slowly enough to notice where they are.

Here is the difficult part to say kindly.

Many coaches and professors have never traveled either. They teach the town they were born into. They teach the roads they know. And without meaning to, they build invisible walls around their students and call it safety. Or efficiency. Or progress. Their students become very good at surviving inside that one place. But they never learn the vastness of the land.

There is a much larger version of Jiu Jitsu waiting beyond urgency. A version that the injured can train. That the elderly can train. That children can grow old inside. A version that does not demand youth or speed or endless recovery. A version rooted in patience, structure, surrender, perception, and timing.

There is nothing wrong with sport Jiu Jitsu.

But there is something incomplete about believing that it is the whole story.

True mastery is not how many people you defeat. It is how deeply you understand where you are standing. It is knowing when to move and when not to. When to force and when to wait. When to take the highway and when to follow the dirt road that only the locals ever use.

If there is one thing I wish more people would give themselves, it is this.

Permission to travel.

Permission to leave the one town they were taught. Permission to get lost for a while. Permission to be slow. Permission to stop chasing points and start learning the shape of the land.

That is where the real art begins.