Good Enough

There are, among the rapier community, several makers of beautiful RBGs. Guns with hammer-scrolled actions, guns with wonderfully engineered actions, I, myself, own a bronze-barreled RBG that easily turns heads. But for the most part, these are not the guns you see on the battlefield. What you see, for the most part, are Lutwiks. For those who don't recognize the name, the Lutwiks are the all-wood RBGs made and sold by, well, Lutwik. And even though they are patterned after historical firearms, they follow the 10-foot rule: i.e. they look relatively period from 10 feet away. And they sell for probably a quarter of what you'd pay for a good RBG.

Basically, they're the Kalashnikov of the RBG word: cheap, durable and reliable.

Now, he'll never get a Laurel for his RBGs. As I've said, they're not works of art. But that wasn't his goal when he designed them. He designed them to be good enough, and that's what they are: good enough. That may not sound like praise, but it is. In real combat, perfection is the enemy. I know that doesn't make sense at first glance but it's the truth. An example is the M16. The M16 is a beautiful piece of engineering, but its made too well. In the hands of an expert marksman, it can put bullet after bullet in the same hole, but if you don't relgiously maintain it, it will jam. Now, compare that to the Kalashnikov. The Kalashnikov isn't the nail-driver the M16 is, but it will consistantly hit a man-sized target, even if its coated in mud.

It holds true for tactics, too. Combat is too chaotic to predict every variable and if you can't predict all of the variables, it's impossible to design the perfect plan. That's why commanders set up their formations with a little built-in flexibility. As the saying goes, no plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

It even applies to your individual fencing style. As another old say goes: if it's stupid and works, it's not stupid. Now, yes, we should all be able to do a textbook-perfect passata sotto, but duck-and-thrust can work too. As I see it, the important part of learning fencing isn't neccessarily learning how to do a particular move, but to figure out how to achieve the same end result in a way that works for you. Of course, to learn how to get the same result, you still have to learn the original move, so you wind up working harder to get the same result. but let me tell you: there's no better way to learn something than to try and figure out how and why it works. And, by taking apart the movements, you add to your own bag of tricks (even if those tricks are only good enough).

So my advice is this: don't seek perfection, good enough will get the job done. After all, good enough to be a White Scarf is, well, good enough to be a White Scarf.