3.49

This will be my last blog of Year of the Ox, as there are only two days left until Year of the Tiger starts. 

The other day I was rewatching the Karate Kid, and this was the first time I watched it and realized that Mr. Miyagi’s teaching style would actually work and isn’t just Hollywood magic. When it got to the infamous wax on/wax off scene, I was following along and doing the motions when I realized that I was almost doing a reverse hooking block. When I realized this, I chuckled and I said to myself “what other moves do I know in this movie.”  It turns out I also knew ‘paint the fence’. Paint the fence is just monkey blocks that go up and down. AfterI finished the movie, I was excited that I found this out, and confused about how I didn’t see it before. I think that figuring this out is a good way to end out Year of the Ox. I’’m now excited to see what I find out during Year of the Tiger!

3.48

Year of the Ox is coming to an end, so it's time to look at everything that's happened this year. All the good, all the bad, all the mediocrity, and all the progress on mastery. 

So lets start with the good. The best apart about my year is passing my Black Belt grading. I had a lot of stress going into it, then it happened and I feel good about it. Do I still have lots of work to do? Yes. Am I working on it? Also yes. Some of my favourite parts of the year was working on the demo, going through all the songs, and seeing how I can shape my forms to fit with all the different songs. Some were definitely easier than others, but the ones that were challenging made me have fun when figuring out how to adapt them. 

Now for the bad. Apart from the schoolwide shutdowns, I have to say that the worse part(s) of the year for me was when I couldn't be at the kwoon to train. I always had lots of respect and admiration for the people who had to be online for all their classes, but I never wanted to do it myself. Now that I have, I have so much more respect for the online guys. Teaching the online kids is also weird, but for a different reason. When I was doing the warm up once, everyone else was muted so all I could hear was myself, and it was kinda eerie. When we were doing stick I had to be extra careful not to hit anything because I didn't have the room I do at the back of the kwoon, I had my basement.

Mediocrity. Something we're all working on eliminating. Something that I didn't do that good on this year. I was a bit late on some of my blogs, so I technically failed that requirement. My other requirements were also inconsistent at times. For the most part, I kept my numbers up, but there were some weeks where I got in less than a days repetitions for the whole week. Not good, but it shows room for lots of improvement.

Mastery. The opposite of mediocrity, something we're all working towards. I felt that my path towards mastery was crystal clear while I was working on my written assignments for the Black Belt grading. There's just something about taking a look deep down inside yourself that makes you feel good and wise about where you're headed.

Year of the Tiger is coming up in a few days, and I'm super excited to "start fresh" without starting fresh. 

3.47

 This past week I was able to go to an in person class on Tuesday, and that was the kids classes. Every other day I was online because I had to quarantine. I'm starting to adapt to doing my classes online, but it was my first time being online for the kids classes. Not being able to interact and help the kids was weird at first, but I kinda got used to it during the last class. Doing stick work in those classes did teach me a very good lesson about spacing, because I was in my basement with my computer 3 feet in front of me and the wall plus couch 3 feet behind me. so space was very limited. When we did the "helicopter" move from the spear form, I kept rotating to try and find a good camera angle that let me do the move without hitting anything. Today is my last day of quarantine, so if everything goes good I will be back in class tomorrow night!

3.46

 This past week my family was on vacation in Mexico, so we did our best to attend to all our classes online. After doing that I realized how different and hard it is compared to in person classes. It has it's pros, like how you can be in class from almost anywhere in the world, but it also has its cons, by being on Wi-Fi that can make a video stream be very choppy and blurry at times. We are now back in Canada, but until we get our Covid test results back we are supposed to isolate at home. So it'll be a bit longer before we're back in person, but being online while others are in person (In Canada, at our house) should prove to be an interesting learning opportunity that I haven't experienced before. 

3.45

Lao Gaur is a form that I struggled to learn. I originally started to learn it in the kids class, while I was an instructor and not a student of that class, so I got a bit of a late start. After that we got shut down and I learned most of the form off of the weekly livestream videos. When we got back to in person training, I had found that there was a few thing I missed, so I worked on those and mostly eliminated them. After that I kept working on the form, finding little things that needed to be fixed. This past week Sifu Langner pointed out the high back stance, and how it needed to be fixed. When it got pointed out, I noticed that it felt off. When we did Da Mu Hsing, it felt off there too. so I have been and will continue to go through all of my forms to find a high back stance that feels off. I'll be playing around with it to see why it feels off, and then I'll do my best to fix it. I know that it's felt wrong in the forms I've done so far, so it's safe to assume that it'll feel off in the rest of the forms. Once I fix my high back stance, it might fix some other problems, and it might uncover new problems too. That's what I'll be working on for the next while.

3.44

3.43

 There's less than a week until grading day and the nerves are starting to kick in. It feels like I still have so much to do in such a little amount of time. I've been able to "control" the nerves so far, but this next week will probably change that. I'm still going to do my best to keep myself calm about it, but grading day will come and when it does I'll see just how effective I am at keeping myself calm. Until then, I'll just keep practicing, I'll do one final diet clean out, and I'll aim for the best. I'll try to keep my mind off of grading as much as possible, but I'll still be mindful about it. I'm not quite sure how it's going to go, but I've prepared myself to the best of my abilities, and I'm sure that will be enough to get me through the day with a positive attitude.