Day 0

I really can't believe it has taken me this long to start blogging about my kung fu, but how does that phrase go again? "the best time to start was 10 years ago, the second best time is today"? Something like that.


So tonight is Lunar New Year's Eve and I'm staring down the upcoming I Ho Chuan year ahead of me head on. 2022. Year of the Tiger. Blackbelt Grading year. And I'm excited,

I'm excited to seriously start down the path of mastery, I'm excited to improve my kung fu, and to DO more kung fu than I ever have before, I'm excited about starting to scratch the surface of the number of reps I need to do to start to improve my techniques and I'm excited to be in better shape than I ever have before and to get more involved with the kwoon, and get closer with my fellow teammates, and my fellow classmates, I'm excited to start blogging, and to start building my lion, and to work on my broadsword, and, and , and,

and I'm scared out of my mind.

I'm scared that I'll fail, I'm scared I'm going to get behind on my requirements, I'm scared because it really should not have taken this long for me to join the team, which means that everyone else has so much more experience than me, I'm scared that I'm not going to know what to do, I'm scared of mediocrity, I'm scared of time, I'm scared of deadlines, I'm scared about getting injured, I'm scared of the uncertainties and the inevitability of change, and, and, and,

But I've faced down a year long project like this before, in a completely different, yet incredibly similar situation during my undergrad thesis project, and because of doing that know that at the end of the year it's not going to be like this, it's not going to be this big culmination of everything I will do this year suddenly coming to a crescendo all at once. It's going to be doing my daily requirements and quietly reflecting on everything I accomplished on each individual day throughout the year. And that's what keeping me from full blown panic and letting me focus on more of the exciting things, the knowledge that it is just one day at a time, incremental progression and constant overall upwards trajectory. Even when there are slipups or bad days. At the end of it all it really won't seem so monumental because it's just going to be doing the same integrated routines, one day at a time. So just because I feel like I'm at the foot of a very tall mountain knowing that by the end of the year, I have to make it to the top, if I just focus on the few rocky steps directly in front of me, it doesn't seem so scary. 

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