The Carreau's Nest

      Realising that grading day is just over 2 months away, I have to look back and think if the effort I put in this year is enough. Listening to Sifu Brinker yesterday in front of the level 1 class talking about how much dedication this program takes and how much effort needs to be put in. My numbers are not anything great, and I'm finding it hard to make recording them a daily habit. As I'm writing this I have pushups/situps and form reps recorded in multiple different locations, and even if I added them together they wouldn't be close to what I need. Acts of kindness are in the same boat too, but probably less so considering I haven't been as mindful as I'd like to be.     Reflecting on this, and being told on saturday that there are still requirements that I have to fulfill (some of them I apparently missed) I'm having my doubts as to if I'll  succeed in December. There have definitely been times where I could have had a different ...

     I've been trying to get back into consistently doing push-ups (and sit-ups but those are easy) consistently each day, since each time I've tried it's a lot harder of a habit than I mentally make it out to be. I've already tried "easing into it" as a method, but that just felt like it made it easier to leave behind when I'm only missing a small amount.     This week I believe I have an opportunity to try to rectify this. My birthday is on the 20th, and I haven't booked any days off in quite some time from work, so I went ahead and booked off the whole week for myself. All this spare time on my hands, and frankly I wasn't planning to do anything particular with it in the moment but I had an idea. Thinking back to yesterday's bootcamp, and last thursday's meeting, Sifu Brinker talked about the idea of our own personal limits. As youth we have an extraordinarily high limit that we cant quite reach that easily, but as we age those limits...

     I'm a mixed bag of emotions right now. We just went through our monthly meeting in the I Ho Chuan and I'm still processing most of it as I'm typing. Coming out of the kwoon with Sifu Brinker going on for almost 40 minutes straight about his experiences of having done kung fu over the years, how he has learned so much over the years and that if he knew this when he was a teen he'd be unstoppable, only to think that same thought 10 years later with the same motivation as back then. He talks about having tried to channel what he's learned into his students, into me, so that I would have that same knowledge he knows now going forward but instead we get to this point and he says one thing; "You're an Idiot!"     ...AND HE'S FLIPPING RIGHT!     GOD, I think back to the last few years of my life and it can go two ways, I've learned a lot /  I could have done more. Most often it's the latter that comes to mind but they are both correct in t...