I think it has been literal years since I posted anything on this blog, and I really am continually surprised that anyone even still reads this blog. I get a little less than 100 views on this blog every month. I'm not even sure what happened to the karate blogs that I used to read regularly. I haven't even tried to read them, but I'm sure the state of karate is virtually unchanged. People like belts, they like clubs and they like hearing that their karate is deadly. It might be. It depends on how you practice it.
I recently spent about five years working at a very hard inner city middle school. I'm not sure how many fights I broke up, but I know that it was probably over thirty. It was infested with gangs, and had many problems. I finally decided to leave teaching there because I no longer got an adrenaline dump when I broke up a fight. This is a bad thing. You aren't supposed to get in that many physical altercations if you are a language arts teacher. Police officer maybe, but teacher no. I can say that my soft karate skills served me well, and I still practice occasionally, but I don't devote my life to it like I used to. In the end, it seemed kind of worthless, like a waste of time. It was a puzzle for years, but now that I figured it out, it seems pointless.
I still wish I could help other people practice, and hopefully practice intelligently. Hard training has only broken my body, and I am only 39 years old at this writing, but my body hurts when it is cold.
Please train smart people.
