The importance of blogging

I have been going over the importance of blogging and what I have heard, learned and now need to embrace about blogging. Blogging is a tool that can be just a hoop for some to jump through, or it can become an amazing tool that really helps you become engaged in what and how you are doing things in your life. It can impact not just your kung fu but also your everyday life if you let it. When you're blogging consistently as a member of the I Ho Chuan, you are connecting with your teammates. By reading and hopefully commenting on each others blogs we are getting insights into our teammates. We see their successes, their hopes, their trials and even their failures. I for one find I can learn from all of that. Being alone struggling through something more often then not sucks. But having a positive minded and supportive team behind you can inspire and motivate in ways you can't do alone. You never know the impact you can have on another by just sharing your journey towards mastery. I have yet to hear of or read of someone who has had an easy road to mastery. Mediocrity is easy to achieve, we see it all around us everyday. But mastery is something worth working towards. It won't happen over nite or even in a month or two. It's a life long journey with many twists turns and sometimes detours along the way. By blogging about what we are going through on our journey we may help another avoid a pit fall or two. We may inspire someone to try something they didn't think they could do before. We can even get a word or two in return that helps us through a difficult time or aspect of our training that we just can't quite figure out. I am finally starting to see what Sifu Brinker means about how much more someone can learn about themselves by overcoming their failures as opposed to just coasting along and not truly stretching our limits and expanding our thoughts. I am not a great writer. Math is my strong suit, or give me something mechanical to fix and I am in there like crazy. When it comes to writing my ideas down I sometimes get to many things going on in my head at once. Blogging has helped me try to put my thoughts and ideas down in such a way that I can make them understood. This helps me focus better. I don't think mastery can be achieved without focus, discipline and definately hard work. If you stay in kung fu for any length of time, you can't be afraid of a little hard work. But achieving the focus and discipline is by no means a piece of cake. Becoming mindful of everything we do and how we impact others. Thats very powerful. How we impact another can have a huge ripple effect, that we often aren't even aware of or can see. But it is there nontheless. I know I have a long ways to go in my journey. But I have alot of teammates and friends at Silent River Kung Fu that are going to make that journey memorable, fun, exciting and very enjoyable. I would rather be in a tiny room full of friends then in a enormous room full of indifferent people anyday. Mr. Hamilton