I was several months past a year at the Salisbury Dojo when towards the end of August I was laid off from my construction job. While the money had been sufficient for our living I could see the future should be doing something else. We finally decided to try Scranton, where my wife parents were living and traveling there I found work in a bank to start as a teller.
That meant a very hurried trip back to Salisbury to pack up and move our household. It was such a hectic time. Several weeks earlier we held a party for the dojo at our rented home and now I had to leave them. Thursday evening I left off the packing and returned to the dojo to explain to Mr. Lewis and everyone we had to move.
One of the sad realities in our world is as important as karate can be in our lives, it cannot be first place. Many times being able to move for work to support the family is far more important. Our country is far different from an island 45 miles long, and how we make our livings are very different today too.
That class was very bittersweet. I loved the training and then Mr. Lewis started me learning Chinto kata, just the opening section, but I thought he was doing it as a going away present. Then at class end I was called up before the class and promoted to Green belt.
There are no words to describe my emotion at that point of time. Suffice it in time I came to realize what promotion really meant. It was never a completion or passing a test, but it was opening newer and harder challenges for me to try and live up to that promotion. The longer I go the more that has become my personal path.
As I’ve gone back 36 of so years writing this, so many old stories opened themselves for me, ones I had put to rest long ago. Now I realize how my study of Isshinryu was first and foremost the classes training, over and over, but it was so much more living an Isshinryu texture in doing so. Karate wasn’t just being a student, but it was participating in more than the dojo, but in an Isshinryu community and if my training was to continue I would have to establish that texture one way or another in any future studies because it had become something very important to my life.
My trip up to Scranton established that there was no Isshinryu and in fact no karate in the Scranton area at that time. I had no idea what I could do but practice what I had worked to learn.
Returning home meant several days more packing and then me following my wife in the car as I drove the UHaul north.
The night was dark as were my feelings. Friends I had made being left behind as I was driving into darkness, the light behind me.
When Mario McKenna suggested I start a blog I thought I’d begin with my passions about karate. When it occurred to me that perhaps many haven’t had a beginning year like I had experienced, it might be of interest to describe it, but taking the time to return to those days has been very personal.
Yes my Salisbury days were over, and you really can’t return home again, but I did go back.
As to how I returned to Isshinryu study, why that’s a tale for another time, I will state that it was literally God’s intervention that brought me back to Isshinryu and made me a black belt. Who was I to reject the movement of his hand across my life.
As I drove on in darkness I only knew somehow I had to return to Isshinryu study.
fin
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