It has been an interesting time here in China!  I have been here for one month now.  I am still having a hard time because I do not speak the language but, I am in class for it now and am learning everyday!  I am pretty sore as of all the training.  It is good, and I am enjoying it!  I didn't however think learning Talo would actually be so difficult.  I got a late start in life in martial arts and my body it fighting back.  I am however determined and set to do the best I can.  I love training, and beiing in a place where so many people are doing the same.  Here in dengfeng, there are many schools for Wushu, and many, many students.  There are about 5 thousand after break is over, and now about 25 hundred.  There are a few schools that are bigger and one that has a lot more.  I see a lot of things I would have done differently, but now I know.  It is my first time traveling outside my own country.  It is also so very different in China from what I know and am used to.  That was a given, however I can't help but feel like I should have seen a few things cooming and been better prepared for this trip.  If I had known I would have actually gotten to go sooner, I would have learned more Chinese for sure.  The way business is done is a small culture shock, in regards to priorities.  Oh well, like I said lesson learned.  So for anyone out there who trains anything in the martial arts as well!  Keep on it, train hard, and be there for others who want to do the same.  Or, are trying to start, it is a rough world to be the new guy on the block. 

I am trying to get everything lined up and ready for my big trip! Flying into Shanghai on the 14th and I get to stay for a whole year!  It is pretty intimidating, but so exciting at the same time!  I feel bad about letting my training slide the way I have this last year.  I am not proud of that at all!  I am ready to make serious changes in my life, especially in my training, and practicing the martial arts.   I have a good beginning but it is only a beginning.  This school will help me in many more ways that I even know!  I want to re orientate my life, and reorder my priorities, and how I live my life!  It was a rough year, but I have learned a lot!  You can always learn, so I am choosing to go somewhere different, to explore the world around me and to make my life something much better! 

There is a way, and how you get there is part of it!

 

We all travel different roads in life.  We cross different markers at different times.  We even cross the same bridges at different times.  Then again at times we cross paths, the same bridge, and even see our path cross and weave with someone else’s.  Some of us even end up walking down the same path.  Life has many twist and turns.  More of it is up hill than not.  More importantly, all of it matters.  You can be given many tools and shown many tricks.  How they are applied and when will both make a difference.  However, the ability to focus and drive onward when others can not, will not, is something that is never just handed out.  It is taught.  It is worked for.  Discovering the strength to keep going is not an overnight occurrence.  There is not even a way to say when specifically it is achieved or finished.  With the challenge of learning never really over, it is all a matter of perspective.  Or is it?  Some things we learn help us in academic studies.  Some things make us stronger physically or spiritually.  Some things we learn make us better in all things.  Then some of us find something that also teaches us things about ourselves that we never knew or considered.  When doors open it can be unexpected.  The ability to walk through difficult ones can be tested.  When you find the way to do it, then you have found something truly profound.  For finding the way is a major part of walking on it!

          My journey to discovering the way begins in college.  Right around the summer of 2006, or so I think…  For all intensive purposes, we shall here on in call the path.  That path being one walked on by the black belt.  More specifically, this is the one who has earned it.    For not all martial arts award black belts or even uphold the belt system.  However it is essentially a way of thinking, a way of looking at achievement or accomplishment.  It is a way of living your life and interacting with those in it, which define what it means.  So in reality choosing any martial art it is possible to become a black belt so to speak.  Actually being one, or living as one is another matter.