What Charles Bukowski Taught Me About Fighting, Writing, and Everyday Life

I never thought a poet would change the way I look at life, let alone writing and fighting.

A prolific underground American writer, Charles Bukowski’s raw view of the world has had an enormous influence on how I think.

If you want to familiarize yourself with Bukowski’s work before continuing, here are a few resources to get your feet wet. Read the 6 Bukowski quotes that will shake your mind, or check out a database of his collected works.

Now, here’s what 3 Bukowski quotes taught me about fighting, writing, and everyday life.

1. Fighting

“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

Sayings like pressure makes diamonds have changed the way people think about adversity. Instead of something to be avoided, challenges and hardships should be sought out.

This is a recurring theme martial arts training, as mental toughness is considered a prerequisite for success in any type of endeavour related to fighting.

Some force themselves to fall in love with the no pain, no gain mentality, embracing struggle because of its known benefits for positively shaping the human character.

Indeed, one of the main appeals of martial arts competition is the idea of testing oneself in a stressful situation.

In a way, fighting is like going to a see a fortune-telling psychic (stay with me, I’ll explain).

The crystal ball represents martial arts competition.
The psychic represents your opponent(s).
And instead of learning about your future, you get the indisputable truth of who you are and what you’re made of at the moment of ultimate pressure, challenge, and battle.

Your authentic self is exposed when you are in the most stressful of situations, and voluntarily walking through the fire is one of the best ways to learn about who you really are.

This is one of the many reasons why fighting makes me happy.

2. Writing

“You have to die a few times before you can really live.”

For every article received and published, several pitches must first go unanswered, declined, or criticized to pieces.

For every final draft that is saved on one’s desktop, a graveyard of incomplete drafts exists in a folder beside it.

For every word and sentence kept, dozens of phrases are scratched out, discarded, or crafted into something better.

Success can’t come without first failing.

In this quote, Bukowski acknowledges that it takes at least a few instances of disappointment to be able to fully and properly experience life.

Maybe it’s the experience gained from dying a few times that makes life more enjoyable?

Or maybe it’s the idea that, once you die a few times, you’re no longer as scared of death?

These words are italicized because they don’t represent literal death, but instead the idea of failure and the fear that comes along with it.

I didn’t write for years because I was scared of what people would think. When I did decide to finally start writing for real, it took me more than a year to share my work with the world, after a few failed attempts at finding a niche and getting words that I was proud of down on paper.

After you become familiar with failure, you realize that it doesn’t bring the end of the world. From there, life opens up and gets a lot easier to manage.

(However, Bukowski would have most likely disagreed with my interpretation of this quote, especially in regards to failing as a writer. Read his poem So you want to be a writer to find out why.

3. Everyday Life

“Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.”

Bad times are inevitable. The way Bukowski sees it, the hardships of life seem to multiply as we age.

The stress of living offers a unique opportunity to look deep within ourselves and to learn about who we really are. Like walking through the fire, these inevitabilities are opportunities to prove our character.

These three Bukowski quotes share a common theme, and it is one I’ve written about before: stoicism.

Adversity should be welcomed because of how well it allows you to learn about yourself. Until you are tested, how can you be sure of your true colours?

Bukowski provides an insightful, raw look into everyday living and the inescapable hardships that come along with being a human.

I looked at these quotes through my lens of personal experience and interpreted them in a way that made sense to me.

One of my favourite aspects of writing is how a quote or text can resonate with such a wide variety of people for so many different reasons.

In the end, Bukowski reminds me to smile at the stressful times that lie ahead because I know they aren’t so bad, and that they may even be good for me, in a way.

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