Hello Alive, and not dead...

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.