Y2K - not the bug thing

Y2K, the year two thousand which has come and gone. Much like the Y2K bug it was not as big a thing as most assumed. Here is where perceptions and the tendency to speculate about what could happen. This seems to be the normal way of humans from my perspective.

Y2K was the big year of change for me and my practice/training of martial arts. Before that year I found that I was just as caught up in the incorrect perceptions as to what martial arts are, were and could be. I write what I write today simply because I lived many of the faults and falsehoods the plague the mind-set toward what should be the more traditional form of practice and training.

What I mean is I suddenly reached this state where my awareness about myself began to open up slowly and incrementally. I had one moment somewhere that year that said, "What if my perceptions are not what I feel they are?" I found out that many of the things I thought, believed and taught were not "right." Not really wrong but in the mind-set I had not really right. Violence and what it is and is about, etc. for instance was not as broad as I would have liked.

This is also where the self-reflective aspects of life started to flourish for me as well. A banner year while being a real eye-opening and a bit discouraging year for me but I came out the other end a much better martial artist finding the true path, for me, toward karate goshin-jutsu-do. You might say I practiced Isshinryu that is goshinryu vs. a less combative discipline I wanted from my training and practice.

Not saying what I did before was not effective but it was not the system I had thought it was and soon would be. This is when I began discussing the terms and beliefs we perceive in relation to how we speak and think of martial arts. I started to separate the chaff from the good stuff while keeping the relevant materials and morphing them appropriately these last twelve years.

I have traveled farther these last twelve years then in the previous twenty-four. I wonder at times that this lack of self-reflection thing is indicative of all youth and that the epiphany does not actually hit us until we reach say the fall/winter years. It has been a most enlightening twelve years and I look forward to the winter years in martial arts to come - an exiting span of time and years for me.