By Glen Beck & Nathan Ingram
In today's fast-moving world, information is literally at everyone's fingertips, and it's become easier to learn something new without much ado. You can acquire a quick tidbit of knowledge after a few simple keystrokes on the computer.
However, regarding the arts, the playgrounds where we live and breathe, digesting our lessons is a different animal. It's boots on the ground, dedication to perfection, and the study of a time-honored lifestyle. Training hours a day turns into months, which becomes decades of documenting and performing warfare's mental and physical aspects.
Each step of a kata, the breakdown of techniques, and the hundreds and thousands of repetitive movements that create muscle memory and a snap-and-pop reaction give us the ability to defend ourselves without notice. Learning and understanding martial arts is far from effortless. Whereas simply reading a computer or Siri-generated answer to a question is so unlike the pain and exhaustion one might endure in our world to become even remotely proficient in a language we've been developing for over millennia.
Years of filling the cup has it now overflowing with chapter and verse as we've absorbed what was passed to us. Yet, when it's time to learn a new system, to add to our repertoire of kicks and punches, turns and blocks, locks and chokes, and sweeps and throws, we need to make room for new information. The nuances of a system different from where we've begun are essential to understand at its basest level. Yet, similar to the misspelling of a word, we gloss over it even when we reread it ourselves. This occurs because, in our minds, we know how it's supposed to be written. While learning the foundations of a new system will most likely be similar to what we've learned elsewhere. We tend to gloss over it because we think we already know a style's fundamental tablet of values and core instruction. However, the truth is that there is more to be learned, always more.…
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