Participation

A brutal lesson I learned early on in my martial arts training as a young teenager, is that ALL training opportunities are temporary. On of the quality control problems in Tai Chi is instructors continuing to teach after they are too old to do free sparring, so that their students fail to fully grasp the applications of the forms. Besides aging out, instructors move, financial circumstances or life priorities change, facilities and other infrastructure deteriorate, etc. so that it is very rare to find a martial arts training opportunity that lasts for more than one generation. Most great martial arts training opportunities with the right people in the right place at the right time are very temporary indeed.

The upside of this for me is that I have been able to train and cross train in a wide variety of martial arts. However I remember when I was young and naive and thought the world would generally more or less stay the same, only to have three instructors move away in 4 years. Now that I have gotten to the point where I have more techniques I have learned that I want to perfect than I will ever have time to perfect, I have a number of people claiming they want to train with me. The question I have though is are they willing to make the kinds of sacrifices I had to make to learn what I have learned?

In Be The Shoulin! 5 years ago I explained that good martial arts training primarily comes for a like minded group of people coming together to train and spar. These kind of groups are only possible when people make sacrifices, especially of time. These groups are almost always very temporary, in my view they typically last less than 5 years on average.

In general, you can't just "wait until you retire" to enjoy life. In the case of martial arts, waiting around for some more convenient opportunity is particularly stuipid because you are getting older, and martial arts is best learned young. If you are 20, you are kidding yourself if you think you will get around to training when you are 25 instead, and by the time 25 gets there you'll have better things to do until you are pushing 40 and your best years for training will be gone. Better to learn at 40 than 50, 50 than 60, and 60 than 70, but procrastination will always be lurking, leaching away your opportunities.

When you see an awesome group you want to train with, and you have that impulse to start training with them, the thing to remember is what you are seeing is NOW, not LATER. Your opportunity to participate is only right now, that exact group is not going to be there a few years from now, and the most knowledgeable people in the group could be gone long before that. The key to learning martial arts is to realize that your only training opportunity is right now.