How to sword good

For the past couple months I've been going to longsword classes at a local club. It's a real club, not like those weaklings with their "buildings" and "gyms" and "equipment". As according to tradition, we meet on Sundays in the Sword Lot, which is an empty lot in which we play with toy swords practice the noble and chivalric art of swordsmanship. Occasionally we share the Lot with tolerant dog owners playing fetch and dogs who would like to fetch us our chivalric implements.

I was thinking about how mindset affects performance in martial arts. I'm not exactly the most martial person in the world, this being my first exposure to any kind of martial art besides a few failed attempts at whacking my way through a wooden board when I was about ten. But in the bouts that I've been in so far, being in the correct frame of mind has been more important than anything else in determining my success. There's no time for me to process what's going on, so I can't go into the exchange in a thoughtful mood. This will lead to pausing after a parried strike to figure out what to do next, which leads to a swift stab into my face. Instead I have to go in with a sort of zenlike focus, in which I come up with a general idea of what I'm going to do and in what way I'm going to do it, and then I just let my body do the rest, using almost no conscious thought in the whole exchange. Thinking is just too slow. By the time my stream of consciousness resumes, the exchange is already usually over.

This is bizarre to me. Not having any prior serious athletic experience, I came into fencing with the tools that I apply to any other problem I have to solve. Those tools don't seem to work very well when a sword is flying directly at your eyeballs. Not that they're not useful in learning the forms, figuring out biomechanics, determining angles of attack, et cetera, but when actually trying to hit the other person, brain no worky, got to go on instinct. This is a problem when your instincts aren't well developed, but it's still stupidly fun. Even if you get bashed on the head repeatedly.