"A Jedi does not take unnecessary risks, knowing that their life is important to the Jedi Mission of bettering the world around them. In overcoming recklessness, a Jedi acknowledges and is mindful of how small the impact is perceived to have on themselves or others." - Jedi Compass, Overcome Recklessness
Thought experiments that ask you to take a bullet for another person are meant to put you in a ridiculous scenario to determine whether or not you will save the life of another person at the expense of your own. It is in the very fact that the scenario calls for the assailant to have a gun that makes the train version of this question superior in really tackling the question of what you value. This is because the gun presents the problem of a repeated action, where as a train can only hit the victim once. A gun or even a knife, on the other hand, can be employed more than once at a rapid rate. The moment you jump in front of the bullet, the intended victim does not have a reasonable amount of time do something before the next trigger squeeze. So you have to make your action count.
Emergency Medical Services are pivotal in saving the life of someone that has life threatening injuries. Sometimes they arrive on scene before the police do, but their training restricts them from going into a scene where there was a known hostile situation. Even when the intelligence makes a statement that the assailant has left the premises, there is no telling what is going on. Although the victim may be bleeding out, a trained individual is no good to them if they are also taken out by someone else before they get to the victim. The EMS squad is told to wait until the police, who are trained to safeguard an area, have deemed the path to the victim safe.
There is no particular answer to how people will react to a situation. There are instances when even trained personnel will step into a fire-fight for the first time and freeze. Sometimes, they never make it to a point where they can engage the enemy. This isn’t common, but it’s something that still happens. There are others who rush into a situation with no regard for what will happen to them because they want to help. Until you are in a situation, you don’t know what your first impulse is going to be. But it is imperative that you work on controlling your response. One of the first steps is to become aware of yourself. This idea that becoming aware of yourself is invaluable to training your body to operate the way you want it to is ever present in Eastern schools of thought. This is one reason you will find that meditation is considered the foundation by which a Jedi’s Path is built.
Learn to train your body to respond to you. This can easily be accomplished through a form of active meditation such as Tai Chi or Yoga. Another methodology is to pick up a martial art like Boken, Jujitsu or engaging in Medieval Martial Arts. Even dance and learning to act are ways that we can force our bodies to comply with our commands. The act of controlling your movements gives you the best possible opportunity to overcome the primal instinct of Fight or Flight. While our bodies may have the best response to help you survive, the decision to choose in a situation where you are not the only person involved and become aware of what is around you, allows you more flexibility in figuring out what to do next. You can look at escape options, recognize obstacles in front of you and so forth. Going back to our bullet example, you can look at the situation and decide instantly whether or not you can grab the intended target and run, if you are close enough to close the gap between you and the gunman, if you can reason with the gunman, pull your own weapon, etc.
Know what a reasonable situation you might find yourself in is. We could tell you to become a jack of all trades, but that would probably be a waste of your time. Not everyone is going to be a firefighter, so there is no real need for a Jedi to engage in firefighter training. So assess the types of things that you would reasonably encounter and train to respond to those situations. This includes vices you may have, such as anger management. Being reckless isn’t just something you can do in the physical sense, you can also be reckless in your words.
Don’t take short cuts. Short cuts can have terrible results. In your job, if you miss a step, it could lead to a loss of a job that supports you and your family. In Japan, one of the most awe-inspiring things I observed, was that everything was an art. The results were phenomenal. Take the fries you get a McDonalds. I kid you not, at every McDonalds I went to in Japan, from various locations in Okinawa, Kyoto and Tokyo, the fries were never greasy. I swear the burgers you see on the boards were taken in Japan, because that is how much care they took in their presentation. The attention to detail and work to improve upon the original preparation was part of the very core of the Japanese culture to value everything they do. This is something that every culture could benefit from learning, to not skip the small details just to get something done. In respects to Overcoming Recklessness, this also means not skipping out on your training.
To give you an example of something that might seem trivial, but can be the difference between someone living or taking their own life. When someone tells us that they are going to commit suicide, we might dismiss it. The first signal that we have they might just be blowing hot air is that they are telling us about their want to die. We might have heard it in the past, and this time it seems no different, so we shove it to the side placating them with cookie cutter statements just to make sure they feel better. These statements might sound something like “Well, you have me. I’m not going anywhere.” or “This is only temporary, what are some things you want to do tomorrow?” in an attempt to make them think to the future. What you don’t realize is that this sort of thing is pushing them over the edge, and the next day the police are at the person’s house attending to a lifeless body.
Today, training in how to deal with someone that claims to be suicidal, tells us that we need to be brave enough to ask the hard questions. Coming from someone that personally worked to coordinate an international effort to save the life of a friend in Afghanistan, the question “Do you know how you would do it?” and beginning to gain information about where on the installation he was, was what saved my best friend’s life. After that, it was a matter of running to the closest Red Cross location and working with them to get a medical team into his barracks room.
Be confident in yourself. We do not always make the right choices, but we cannot waiver when we make a decision to follow through with something. Much like shortcuts, hesitation can get you and others killed. All of the aforementioned concepts can be summed up in a very simple understanding- which is when a martial artist interacts with a plank. The goal is to break it in half. But to get there, you have to condition yourself through mental and physical training. If during the motion you hesitate at all, which is linked to confidence of action and commanding your body to act despite the potential pain, your potential for success is less than 1%.
Our life is of equal importance to all around us, but we cannot put our life at unnecessary risk simply because it could place more lives in danger in the long run. An ambulance can only carry one patient at a time. So when you place yourself at risk, you create more need for medical personnel to attend to the scene. This takes away resources for other problems. As such, we need to be aware of what our actions may mean.
For your assignment assess what types of situations you reasonably might find yourself responding to that might cause you to be reckless. What kind of training do you plan on undertaking to overcome these situations? If you need help determining a plan of action, feel free to reach out to the knights and masters of our three aspects here at Force Academy.