In our journey through life, it may at times seem as though we’re passing through a great jungle, devoid of civilized comforts, safety nets and hospitality. Where huge trees of worry take root in the soil of aspiration and shed used leaves, which create a carpet of urgency, pushing us along.
At some point in our journey, we come to a river or a gorge to cross and it’s at that point that our lives’ paths are shaped. How we choose to cross that river determines what our lives will be like. Of course, using a boat is the most reasonable way to cross a river and, as martial artists, our first boat comes in the form of the quest for our black belt.
As we settle in to make our boat from scratch, learning the skills to do it becomes a quest in itself. Learning the moves, the state of mind and everything else that comes along with becoming a black belt is like the skills we need to make a boat that will safely carry us across the river. You spend years searching for the best wood to make the boat, you take meticulous care in crafting your tools and you spend redundant amounts of time making sure your craftsmanship is immaculate.
And when you’ve finally finished your boat, it’s time to cross the river. You take your beautiful new black belt and you head out across the water. As you handily breeze to the other side, you get out of your boat and realize that, just ahead of you, is another river, this one twice the width of the one you just crossed.
The realization comes that you won’t be able to use the same boat you just made to cross this new river. So you immediately set to work on a new boat, taking the same extreme care that you did before on the old boat. This new one, though, will have to be bigger, with more luxuries, to make sailing even better than before.
This happens when we decide to learn a new style. Moving on from our black belt status, we learn more things, new moves, and new ways to expand our minds into deeper realms of the martial arts. It’s something that almost everyone does when they get to this point, because, in the martial arts, as in life, we are never truly done learning.
The jungle never ends and neither do the opportunities to build new boats and cross new rivers. Some will build boats that look nice, some will build sturdier boats and some will take the time to teach others how to build their own boats. How we choose to cross these rivers defines our character.
But as we progress farther into the jungle and we get farther and farther from the place we started, do we begin to forget what it was like to build that first boat? Is it completely lost, that feeling of completing our first black belt? Going back and forth in the jungle, have we gotten too far from the reasons that we first started doing martial arts?
There’s a scene from the classic movie, Enter the Dragon. A shot of a finger pointing to the moon, and if you look at the finger, you miss the moon. If we look too long at the boat, we miss the important part of the journey. And if we get distracted, then we get lost in the jungle and worry about making the boat nice, as opposed to using it as the tool it should be, for simply crossing the river and continuing with our journey.
If we linger too long on the specifics of building our boats, then we forget to carry on with our exploration of the jungle we’re in, and that is what we’re all here to do. Our boats will cross the rivers, but after we’ve crossed, we don’t need to keep them. It’s time to move on. Take your time to build your boats, but don’t forget that it’s what’s ahead, not behind, that matters.◆
Fariborz Azhakh is the owner and head instructor of Team Karate Centers Inc. in Woodland Hills, California, and produces martialinfo.com, one of the world’s largest and most prestigious martial arts Web sites. He can be reached at fariborz@teamkaratecenters.com.
