Built Into My System

You know times have changes when your mom bugs you about your recent lack of blogging. She did it over the phone talking to my wife. I’ll be more worried when she starts following me on Twitter, or calling the voice mail line for my podcast.

But I didn’t come here to talk about my mother … I came here to talk about music & martial arts.

I haven’t talked about it much, but I took a hiatus from martial arts about six months ago. After being a brown belt for far too many years, I needed a break. Time to reflect, re-evaluate & discover what exactly was going wrong. I enjoy martial arts, and feel I was good at what I did … but I didn’t feel like I was getting any better.

A lot of it was being generally frustrated at life. That’s a longer story than I want to tell here, but overall I needed a break from being scatterbrained. I let a lot of hobbies drop or put less effort into them so I could focus on the core of my life. And it’s been good.

Dragon*Con came and went. I use all of the prep work for Dragon*ConTV and videography as an easy excuse for not getting things done, but in reality I just needed to let some things go for a while and see what happened. The things I really want to do are still active in my mind, and some of them are burned into my brain stem.

Percussion happens to be one of them …

Last weekend I attended a great party at my friend Brooks’ farm in TheMiddleOfNowhere, Georgia. People who come to my house in Loganville and complain that I live “in the middle of nowhere” should note that my noble town has cell reception, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Home Depot, three grocery stores that aren’t Wal-Mart and more fast food than you can shake a health inspector’s probe thermometer at.

Brooks farm has … um … horses … and very little cell reception. But that works well when you want 40 people to come eat food, drink beer & listen to live music. Brooks is a great singer (used to be a backup singer in L.A.) and still plays with fantastic musicians. I got over an hour to jam with these folks, and I held my own very well for someone who hasn’t played a drum kit in 9 months. Everything felt natural, even if I wasn’t doing anything complicated. I even got compliments.

When I went to talk to Master Sams about taking a hiatus from martial arts, he was disappointed but understanding. He was also a little confused, because he wanted me to test for my next brown belt level (another “stripe” on the way to black belt). I don’t feel ready for that next level, even if I know I’m fundamentally solid.

“I’m not worried about you coming back, you’ll do fine,” he said. “It’s built into your system now.”

Since I left I’ve dreamed about martial arts … teaching it, using it to defend myself, explaining moves to the people I’m defending myself against (yes, one dream has me explaining the mechanics of an arm lock to the guy I’m dropping into the concrete). Like the percussion, it’s part of the system. Somehow it’s in the core of my being.

I never stopped being a drummer, I just don’t play every day.
I never stopped being a martial artist, I just haven’t been to the dojo in a while.
I never stopped being a writer, the words just don’t come out of my head as often.

Don’t worry mom, it’s all built into my system. It will come out again.