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.
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