Systematic Approach

While in the kwoon Thursday night there was a comment made about the team scheduling and working with/ around a certain student’s date night with his wife - I get that, but I don’t believe everyone did. This was just another reminder about how individual this journey is, incorporating kung fu into my life is much different than the student standing beside me. The team has a whole must grow together to incorporate everyone’s sacrifices as a whole, this I Ho Chuan experience as a team member goes beyond any other that I’ve ever experienced (in a good way!).

The direction which I take to mastery is not going to be the same as anyone else’s, reason being is due to what I chose to master. Silent River, I Ho Chuan, kung fu, my job and every other tool that I use in my life will be put to my intended use and will serve me uniquely.

I feel mastery can take many avenues. For me it starts with myself...mastering myself (knowing my strengths, weaknesses, limitations, capabilities, etc), I don’t know if I’ll ever get that straight, but that’s where is starts for me. What goes hand and hand with my number one pick are my boys and wife, my family life. Kung fu and all the other tools need to start within the individual and the construction of their individual foundation. If we (I) can’t get that straight, how can I affectively move on to build on unstable ground.

Many times I feel I have all my ducks in a row and the next step to my “kung fu” training seems to fall into place more fluently, with purpose and intent, other times not so much. When I feel that and moving to the next level is like a huge stumbling block, I know that I need to step back and rectify my ground work. To me, the “art of Kung Fu” is a subsidiary to kung fu. I have a hard time putting all the ground working tools of kung fu off to the side and working solely on forms and the practical/physical attributes of kung fu, it’s just not systematic enough for how my mind and body work. To put this into context, I stayed after black belt class on Friday and did some ground work with Sifu Lietz, which was great, four hours of kung fu on pretty much my first day back – nothing like progressing wisely, huh?; anyway it was awkward – and had to get Sifu Lietz to back up a few times to explain the basics of basics so that I could comprehend and move forward, otherwise it would have been all for nothing. This needs to be my approach to all aspects of my life, it may be a much slower approach in the short run, but I hope that the quality of all that is impacted is better as a result .

I just needed to throw this out there as a focal point for myself, to reassure myself that I’m doing the right thing for me and my journey. This bothers me because I see people taking an entirely different approach, one which seems to focus primarily on the physical kung fu, while putting family and ground work on the back burner (not as temporary sacrifice but much more long term).

As a side note and disclaimer as you will , journaling is great, it is a form of communication for me (communication to myself mainly), I only wish my computer could talk back and express its thoughts, that way my journal and personal thoughts could stay as to not offend anyone. I can appreciate Sihing Chervenka’s thoughts (even though not entirely healthy from my perspective and wouldn’t correspond very well with the purpose of our journaling), when he said, that he is a hidden person and doesn’t like to reveal anything about himself and doesn’t care to know anything about anyone else (my words, but I believe the context is there). I can relate, especially when I offend someone with my personal opinions, thoughts or self writings.

Any thoughts from readers of this post, I’d like to hear them.

 

Darcy Regier

http://darcyregier.blogspot.ca/