Pursuing Martial Arts

If you would have told me even ten years ago I would not only be into martial arts, but would be a black belt and instructor, I would have told you you were nuts. I was never an athletic person, to the point of flunking out of gym class in my junior year of high school due to non-participation. So how did the person I am change so much in that time?

The answer is something I found the closer and closer I got to my black belt. I wasn’t changing the person I am, but becoming the person I should have been before. Fear kept me from participating in life, and I learned there was another whole world out there for me if I just opened myself up to it.

My son, Mike, was the first to jump into martial arts, and I say jump, because he never had the fears that I once had. Despite this, the road hasn’t always been easy for him. I like to say he’s on the nine-year plan for getting his black belt in tae kwon do, which is far from the norm. Today, he would be the first to tell you he didn’t always put as much into his training as he could have and ultimately paid the price. Nevertheless, he is finally testing for his black belt next weekend, and if all goes as planned, I think it will mean more to him that he is earning it at this point in his teenage years, rather than as a tween with no understanding of what he was doing.

A few months after Mike joined martial arts, I started a kickboxing class just for the workout benefits. I didn’t realize it, but martial arts was already changing my life. A few years later, when kickboxing had become more important to me than I cared to admit, the class was discontinued. They couldn’t be blamed for this, as often as I was the only student. I would watch my son take his tae kwon do classes and wish I could do it, too, but that old fear ruled me.

I conjured up the courage and joined the tae kwon do class once the kickboxing class ended. I had no intention of pursuing martial arts at this time, and just thought I was there for the workout, figuring I’d progress a few belts then taper off. But something interesting happened here. With every belt I progressed to, I wanted to earn just that next one, then be done. I’d earn that next belt, and then want to earn the one after that. I then brought my daughter, Lizzie, in to join Mike and I in our pursuit. She was 6, and I wanted her to know how to defend herself by the time she was a pretty teenage girl.

Looking a few belts past my own still scared the hell out of me, but somewhere along the way I stopped thinking I would plateau off and started realizing I would at some point face my fear and just do it. As an adult in the program I was asked to start helping out with the lower ranks and renewed an old passion I had for helping others. I tested for my first dan black belt in the summer of 2006, and it was then I realized I hadn’t become a different person, but was uncovering the person I was all along.

I’m currently an associate instructor, and instead of pursuing my second dan this summer, I started exploring Chinese martial arts, learning tai chi, with the hopes of teaching it someday. There are a many similarities, as well as a few differences between the Korean and Chinese martial arts, and it’s that that excites me as I go through this training. Yet that’s the whole point of martial arts. You’re never done learning. There is always more to learn and discover. Perhaps I’ll always be pursuing martial arts … or at least as long as this body will let me.

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