Cognizant Engagement

I have been following the UBBT for a couple of years now and as a member of the 100 I have worked alongside the team members for a while. I have been pretty aware of the level of commitment that is required as a UBBT member and so I had no doubts that everything I have going on in my personal, professional, and kung fu life dictated quite decisively that tackling something like the UBBT was not a reasonable nor sane ambition.

For some reason August saw me contemplating the insane. I contacted Coach Tom and laid out the million and one reasons I had for not tackling this project at this time. I had expected him to either confirm my suspicions that my insane schedule would guarantee my failure or at the opposite end of the spectrum, for him to try and talk me into making the commitment. He did neither. He firmly put the responsibility for the decision in my lap. “There will never be the perfect time to take on something like this” and “The UBBT is not for everyone” were the two statements he made that had the biggest impact on me. Especially the second one, I guess I am more competitive and ego driven than I thought.

After consulting with Hal Gustin and much soul searching, I decided that Coach Tom was absolutely correct. There really is not a perfect time to take on something like the UBBT. Thirteen months is a long time to keep life from interfering with your well laid out plans. Of course something is going to go wrong in that time, why would I expect next year to be any different? The only difference next year will be that I will have another year of mediocrity under my belt and my age will have toggled up by one.

I am now two months into my requirements and anything that could go wrong probably has. My personal and professional lives have become more stressful than I thought possible and I have developed an undiagnosed problem with my legs that pretty much makes grappling, forms, and sparring an impossibility for the foreseeable future. If I could have seen this coming, I definitely would not have enrolled at this time and that would have been the biggest mistake of my life.

What I see now is that the more stressful my life is and the more insane the UBBT requirements are, the more I need this challenge. I have had injuries and setbacks throughout my martial arts career and every physical setback brings with it a correlating mental challenge and vice versa. However my current physical setback has had zero effect on my mental state and rather than pulling me back from my training, it has me even more engaged and cognizant of my progress. Despite the monkey wrenches, I have never been more excited about my kung fu and never more sure of the course that my life is on.

Ironically this has turned out to be the perfect time for me to tackle the UBBT. Luckily for me I happened to stumble into it for all the wrong reasons. Funny how things always work out.

“We choose to go not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to measure and organize the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” - John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917 - 1963)