On a personal note….
I’m sitting here during the Great Global Pandemic wondering, like most, if there is an end in sight. It is dark, the veil of night long since fallen and the house embraced by silence that is common this late. For the second time tonight, I find myself staring at the overwhelming chores of building a business and thinking, “it’s never going to work.”
This is a normal occurrence too. A couple of times a day, my irascible mind describes in great detail how all the things I am trying to accomplish will never come to fruition.
I am reminded, though, of memories past. Tonight, specifically, it is the memory of my first black belt test. How myself and my classmate were ‘set up’ by our teacher. We were there to test for black belt, to be judged by other black belts and masters, yet our teacher took it upon himself to ‘give’ us our black belts the night before the test. Told us we had to wear them to the test.
We knew going in, this was a problem. How presumptuous to show up with the black belts we hadn’t earned? How arrogant? I remember then thinking, “it’s never going to work”. That problematic mind suggested several times, “We are not ready. We can’t do this.”
Yet, there we were.
And we paid. Dearly. They all came after us. We were singled out to do more as each Master and upper black belt from all the regional schools got his or her turn to call cadence or form. We were targeted by all regardless of rank because we neither fit into the group of those testing, nor the group testing us. We had to fight everybody. Twice. And what they all held in reserve for all the other testing students, they unleashed on us. We were alone. We were to be examples. We were examples. We both knew it and we both wanted to quit many times throughout that test.
But we didn’t quit. Neither he nor I. We kept moving, we kept fighting, because in our minds, we had no other choice. There was no other goal except to get through the next piece; the next trial. It never occurred to us that this was by design. It didn’t sink in until much later that our teacher hadn’t set us up to fail, but to test our resolve. At the end, after the Masters made us stand still for over an hour after a physical ordeal that lasted hours, both of us bruised, exhausted, and soaked, we still didn’t know if we’d passed. We both thought we had been punished for our temerity.
What we did know, though, was certainly not defeat.
So, here I sit, typing this post while the hour grows late, not knowing if success or failure is around the corner, reminding myself of one of my favorite sayings:
“When climbing the mountain, you can quit as many times as you like, as long as your feet keep moving.”