Saturday, May 29, 2010

The Master

There have been two key events in my martial arts career that have been very important in shaping the way I view martial arts training, and martial arts masters.

One was shortly after my red sash test. (For those who don't know, at East West Kung Fu, the red test is one of the "big deal" tests.) A fellow student who started training before me, but had been out of the school for some time when I got my red sash, had just come back to class. He saw me with my red sash on. He came over to me and in a low voice said, "How does it feel like to know you can walk through walls!?!?"

Walk through walls? I was shocked, that hadn't been part of my red sash test. I realized that he had this illusion of graduating into the upper ranks of kung fu. This illusion that if you reached that level, you were somehow more than human. I really still felt human. I really still was human. I couldn't figure out how he had come to believe that my martial arts experience made me more than human, until I caught myself doing the same thing to someone else.

In 2002 I had the opportunity to travel to China and participate in seminars with Chen Yong Fa, the "keeper" of his family lineage of martial arts. (His great, great, grandfather started Choy Lee Fut Kung Fu.) I was in China for a couple of days before I saw Chen Yong Fa, I didn't realize how much I had built him up in my mind until. . .

I was loading on the bus to go from Guangzhou to Xin Hui where we would be training. I got on the bus and started looking around out the window. There he was, the keeper of the style. There was Chen Yong Fa, one of, if not THE most qualified teacher of Choy Lee Fut on the planet. There he was standing on the sidewalk . . . smoking a cigarette?

WHAT?

"Yoda is not supposed to be a smoker," my martial arts fantasy was screaming at me. Then I caught myself, and thought, "Oh yeah, he's just a guy."

Sure he's a guy who is really really good at what he does, but he is just a guy.

Before and since then I've met a lot of kung fu masters, John Ng, Tom Pardue, Don Averitt, Tracy Sawyers, Kenny Vaughn, Lam Chun Fai, Don Hamby, Mike Marshall, Mak Hin Fai. . . Now I have it solid in my head, they are just ordinary people, ordinary people who have acheived extraordinary things, but ordinary people.

I've seen these guys do amazing things, but I've also seen them in less amazing situations, I had a staff meeting with one of them in swim trunks bobbing in the Gulf of Mexico, I've seen one of them tell conflicting stories about his kung fu lineage, one of them shared his dinner with me when mine didn't arrive at the restaurant.

Some day, some one will confer upon me the title "master". Keep in mind, I'm just a guy, sitting here, typing away and drinking the coffee my wife made this morning.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Act Before the Emergency

Start your self defense now. Don't wait for the emergency. Sure there are things you can do if you are attacked. There are the punches, the kicks, the knees to the groin, and so on, but why wait for the emergency to defend yourself. Develop habits starting now that will prevent the emergency. Develop habits like avoiding known trouble spots, anger management, communication skills, and kindness. Do a good job with these and you may never have to use the emergency measures.

Start your self defense now. Don't wait for the emergency. Sure there are things you can do if you are attacked. There are things like chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery, and so on, but why wait for the emergency to defend yourself. Develop habits starting now that will prevent the emergency. Don't smoke, maintain a healthy weight, protect your skin from the sun, eat your fruits and veggies. Do a good job with these and you may never have to use the emergency measures.

Friday, May 14, 2010

You Would Think. . .

Once, in a conversation with a friend about communication, my friend said, "You'd think he'd have figured that out a long time ago." I responded, "Why would you think that, did you tell him a long time ago?"

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Tournament Training

I've officially started training for the tournament. This is unusual for me. Although I've gone to one or two tournaments a year for the past several years, it has been a long time since I actually decided I was going to play to win. In the recent past, I've picked my competition forms the week of the tournament, sometimes the night before the tournament. Not this time, this time I am preparing my sets starting now, two months ahead of time.

I'm also preparing for the continuous sparring. I have changed my cardio from two minute rounds with a one minute break, to 45 second rounds with a 15 second break. It makes for a different workout. It is more intense action over a shorter period of time. The last time I sparred in a tournament I was doing long cardio sessions, and long sparring sessions, this trained me to pace myself for long periods instead of pushing harder for the two minute rounds in that tournament.

The truth is, I still don't care if I win or not. This time, I am going to enjoy the training a lot more.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

If ADD Were the Norm

If what we call ADD were the norm, and those who didn’t have those attributes were rare, we would likely still call the condition of the few ADD. Those people who had ADD would be the unfortunate ones who were unable to tune out the background noise of life and focus on the task at hand. They would be the ones who were unfortunate enough to have to stop typing, reading, or solving a puzzle to have a conversation. They would be considered unfortunate in that they could not quickly jump from what they were thinking on to a new, more interesting, and probably more important topic. Intolerant people would be frustrated with the inability of those so afflicted to leave a task for later, their inability to jump to another task, then back to the one at hand. They would seem slow, unable to adjust to new situations, unable to start preparing for a task until after they had completed the first one. We would be surprised that they didn’t have the multiple channels of attention, having to get through life only thinking about one thing at a time.

With patience and tolerance for those people, however, we could make the most of their uniqueness. We would need someone to go behind us and turn off the stove, to remind us of the unfinished projects, to organize the wonderful piles of work we created into meaningful and manageable conditions. We would need them for those boring jobs like analyzing data and doing research. Basically, if we could just be patient with their shortcomings, they could serve an important role in our society.

We need to remember in life, that just because someone is different from us, doesn't mean there is something wrong with them. We all have our place and purpose and our uniqueness should be seen as an advantage.