It's real, not practice

Sometimes people wonder when we actually get to practice the moves we learn in kali in real life.  It's not always apparent.  But it is there.

It has been interesting these last few weeks that I find the lessons of kali reverberate not just in what I'm teaching in class but in every day life.  There are some choices I've made to put me in a certain direction, there are others soon to be made that will test my "eye" for quality.  And the consequences for these decisions are very real, they both impact my life and others.

I have to take into account not just the present day but the future and I have to predict the next few years the same way I set up and predict the direction of my opponents.  I have to understand the wave that I create from this choice.

I have come to understand the choices or more often than not the non-choices people have made before me.  To not act, to not choose, is a choice that more often than not postpones the inevitable to the future, which in this case is my present.  The choice doesn't go away, it just makes whoever gets the choice down the line even harder.  One of the difficulties of the budget situation is that people want to choose not to choose, to hope someone else will bail them out or grant them forgiveness.  Neither is around in any abundance.  But what it does is that because individuals at the bottom cannot make the hard decisions, that decision moves up the chain and the farther and farther you are, the larger the blade you need to make a slice.

There is only so much one can do to avoid being cut, but no doubt one will get cut.  How deep of a wound do you wish to suffer?

This is where my training and I mean all of my training from the kali to the leadership development to even 6th grade crossing guard captain has brought me to.  

I know that change is painful.  Mostly because people do not change until it hurts.  It being whatever it is they're in now.  The other incentive of course is pleasure.  They change because the thing they are going to is more pleasurable.  But pleasure is difficult to measure once someone is acclimated to the pain of their present state.

I know from kali a delay in decision making, a delay in acting determines how deep is the wound.  

I regret I was unable to made these choices earlier and yet I did not fully have the tools to do it. But regret has no place here. The proper choice is both about its decision and its timing.  And I have to believe that when I make the decision, when I act will be the proper time for everything to happen.

I imagine in the Year of the Ox, an Ox plowing the rows in a field.  I hope that if I keep plowing that by the end of this year I will have a nicely sown field that will give me great harvests in the future.  I can only hope.