Sixteen years is the required age for acquiring a driver’s licence. I know it was a lifetime for me to get to that age. I have vivid memories of daring deeds and experiences all accumulated before I was eligible to drive.
When my daughters were born, it was a lifetime before I had to worry about them dating or driving. Again, many vivid memories of their life milestones over their first sixteen years.
The squirrel chattering at me while I write this was not around sixteen years ago, nor will he be around sixteen years from now.
Sixteen years ago I mortgaged my house to get a permanent home for Silent River Kung Fu. I look at photos from those first few weeks while we worked to turn two empty bays into a unified training space, and cannot help but smile at our naivety. There’s Sifu Hayes and I grinning from ear to ear while we grouted the tile that we had carefully laid throughout the building only to have to jackhammer it all out a couple of days later. There’s the memory of crushing the main water line during those first renovations but somehow managing not to puncture it. We had no expertise but we all shared a vision.
While the memories of our initial construction exploits remain vivid, they seem to come from two lifetimes ago. So much has happened in the past sixteen years. The kwoon has expanded, along with the mortgage, and the spirit and love of a whole new generation of martial artists is embedded within its walls.
Sixteen years. Seems like a lifetime when you are a kid. Seems like a lifetime if you are paying off a mortgage. A lot can happen in a sixteen year time period, but most of us only have five of those in our lifetime.
“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” - Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
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