Even within a few months of starting training, you feel different. You feel good. Your friends and family notice the change. It happens to everybody.

 

Now, if you put a three-year practitioner next to a ten-year practitioner, you can tell the difference in skill and demeanor. But not all of the difference between them is visible. And since they weren’t identical when they started, the results of all their hard work are not obvious if you compare them.

 

What we would really want to do is compare people as they are now, after years of training, to how they were five or ten years before, or how they would be now without any training at all.

 

Not too possible. So how do you assess the long-term effect of training? How do I tell the college student what her karate is all about after all these years, when the savor of daily dojo practice, the novelty of martial arts as an interesting toy, is gone? What replaces it?

 

She is fit, fast, powerful, skilled. Her mind is sharp and clear. She takes those things for granted, as if they were part of her constitution, inherently in her make-up, as if these qualities were not the temporary and conditional result of her training all these years.

 

Beginners experience their practice as an “object-with-characteristics,” that is, something separate from themselves that they are acquiring. Beginners experience practice as something that is separate from them. They use it to hone their skills, tone their bodies, sharpen their minds; to feel how they want to feel.

 

For people who continue to train, their practice of karate, which earlier on seemed to be an object-with-characteristics, turns into, after all those years of effort and increasing mastery, not something separate from them, and not just a part of them, either. It is them.

 

What do I say to the 50 year old who cannot or doesn't feel good doing the grappling techniques because his joints are stiff and resistant? What do I say that is good for all of them, including the inspired ones, the delighted ones, the great athletes, the entire spectrum of abilities and range of personalities and experiences that would help them all, not discourage any or elevate any in a false way?

 

Should I tell the older students they are old, their bodies are not as strong as they once were, and they should just accept it and do less? Is it enough to tell the young, strong ones that they must work harder to make the most of their time?

 

All of us will be old and young. We will experience all kinds of days in practice.

 

When we enter the dojo for training each day, all of us, regardless of rank or age, come in a little faded and foggy. We have been at work or school all day, and we are bringing in with us all the disturbances and distractions that have been accumulating throughout our busy, jangled modern day.

 

After training, we feel fresher. We sense that a kind of cleanness has come over us. We feel transformed, with our bodies alive and our senses more acute and our minds more settled and clear. The experience of training is more like shedding a skin than accumulating something. It is more like being reborn in the heat and pressure of training, than something to be measured in terms of gain and loss.

 

Competition is a good thing. But it cannot be the only thing. Being the best in the Olympic sense may be a worthy aspiration for some people sometimes, but it is harmful to most people if it becomes the model for our lives.

 

All people can benefit from participating in sports, not just for the purpose of being the best or being great, but as an expression of our human vitality and our shared life. All people can enjoy singing. But now, with fine recorded music available to everyone, people have become ashamed to sing in public, because they are not such good singers. Should we give up on everything because there are a few individuals with virtuoso abilities in a single area which makes us feel lesser in comparison? Should we not pray because there is a virtuoso prayer out there?

 

The Olympic spirit — in sports, arts, culture, and so on — can suppress the human spirit as much as inspire it. Each of us can fulfill our own potential, majestically, as human beings. There is no limit to how many great people can be in the world at the same time.

 

As real practitioners, training day in and day out, for years, decades, a lifetime, we will strive diligently.  We do not need to concern ourselves too much with gain and loss. We simply shed the skin of the past, and so through training become refreshed and reborn in the daily immediacy of our own life.