My First Kung Fu Class

I don’t do as many things as I used to. Money has been an issue for the past couple of years, along with my own growing dissatisfaction with well… everything. I spend a lot of time looking into stuff, and at times even planning stuff, but rarely do I execute.

It’s worth mentioning how my mental health plays a role in this. My time and energy are finite, and social situations can increase my feelings of anxiety (and use up this energy), which can make things more difficult than they should be. There is an irrational belief that if I see something I like, as long as I don’t engage, I won’t be disappointed. Sometimes it just seems better from the sidelines.

Of course, living this way is not the healthiest. By playing it safe, I keep from being disappointed, but also from being delighted. I cut myself from being part of something, from making new friends, and from challenging myself. In my attempts to play it safe, I end up hurting myself, and I’ve known this for quite some time. Sitting alone, in the dark, watching movies has made for some good experiences, but has also provided for a very isolating and empty existence.

As discussed over the past few weeks, martial arts played a big part in my early childhood and was something I thoroughly enjoyed. My time taking class didn’t last very long, but I grew up around the industry as my mother fell in love with Tae Kwon Do and opened her own school.

I found myself back in a martial arts school around twenty years ago, when I began taking Krav Maga. The idea of bucking the traditional martial arts in exchange for practical self-defense appealed to me, and I went all in on absorbing every bit of knowledge I could. Every free moment I had, I was at the Krav Maga school training, learning, and becoming better. I loved it, although ultimately, a chance encounter with Tai Chi ended up stealing my heart. I’ll tell this story another time, as it deserves a more thorough explanation, but thanks to an incredible instructor I discovered that traditional martial arts were not as lame as my ignorant twenty-year-old mind had begun to believe. In a class with six people that could have been my grandparents, I discovered more about myself and my body than I ever did going all out hitting pads, performing flips, and acting macho.

When I moved in the early 2000s, I immediately went looking for a Tai Chi class to continue my training. Unfortunately, what I found at the time was not similar to what I had been training earlier. Tai Chi was not being trained as a martial art, but more of relaxing set of moves. I never did step back into a school, but I’d occasionally look online for new Tai Chi classes in hopes of finding something I could participate in.

Within a few years, a new school emerged that offered Tai Chi as a martial art alongside Kung Fu. I bookmarked the site and for the past twelve years or so, I’ve talked about taking a class and getting back involved. Heck, I’ve discussed it so many times, my wife actually thought I’d gone to class.

But in my typical fashion, I stood back and tried to find everything wrong with the school. Where did the training originate? What were the instructor’s credentials? Did I want to drive to that part of town? What were the class hours? What’s up with Kung Fu, why would anyone want to take that? I allowed my negative thoughts to run wild and every time I’d get close to taking a class, I’d talk myself out of it.

These days, traditional martial arts are looked at as being outdated and a waste of time. Jiu-Jitsu is the all the rage, and MMA schools dominate teaching a variety of high impact martial arts. Despite having learned better in my early twenties, over the years I’ve allowed this bias to creep back in. I was only focused on taking Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or Muay Thai, because I didn’t want to “waste my time.” I wanted to be a badass, like everyone else. So, upon first glance, the idea of stepping foot in a Kung Fu school didn’t appeal to me.

But then late last year, a couple of things crossed my mind that made a difference.

1. I’m a germaphobe and the more I thought about rolling around with another human being sweating and being in my face, the less appealing Jiu-Jitsu became.
2. Then when I began thinking about Muay Thai, being that I’m no longer a young buck, the idea of the getting hit in the head began to feel way less interesting as well.

This thought actually led me to something I learned while taking Tai Chi.

My instructor Bill was an older gentleman with years of martial arts experience under his belt. He had trained with the person who opened the Krav Maga school, but Krav Maga was not something Bill was interested in doing. He sat back and watched class, and noticed things my young mind didn’t. He watched the injuries rack up. He saw how badly people were getting hurt in class, especially those in their mid-thirties and older. I was around twenty years old, and even I ended up with a neck injury that continues to plague me to this day.

One day, shortly after the assistant instructor snapped his ankle in class, Bill took me to the side and told me to get all the combat sports out of my system at a young age. Take Jiu-Jitsu or Judo when I’m in my twenties and change it up when I get older, because the human body wasn’t designed to incur this type of damage on a regular basis. I honestly didn’t think much of it at the time, but as I’ve seen the limitations of my body began to take shape into my forties, I now understand where Bill was coming from.

When I remembered this conversation, I realized that I was being ignorant. I was dismissing Kung Fu and in some strange way, avoiding this Tai Chi class because I thought I needed to get into a certain shape and take something more aggressive. I had an excuse to not show up to a Jiu-Jitsu class, because I didn’t feel like I was in good enough shape to not get hurt, but with Tai Chi or Kung Fu, I would be competing against myself, which would give me the time and space to learn, get in better shape, and grow as a practitioner.

And so, I decided I would take that step. I’d attend a class and see how it goes. My original goal was to do this in July, once our finances settled down a bit, but I realized that I needed to strike while the iron was hot. So, Friday night I decided I’d go to a class on Saturday. My loving wife, knowing my apprehension about stepping foot in a new place with strangers, volunteered to come with me, and so we showed up to a combo class teaching both Tai Chi and Kung Fu. It was amazing.

The instructor was incredible. The class was informative, welcoming, and is set up to always be engaging. To make things ever better, it’s very affordable, which makes it even easier for me to justify taking the class. Heck, the classes are even live-streamed for those days when it’s difficult to make it there.

We walked out the door of the school and I turned to my wife and said, “Wow, that was way better than I thought it would be” and I couldn’t help but think about how much time I’ve wasted when I could have been learning and training.

My wife has enough on her plate with various exercise programs, but I’ll be signing up today. After all these years of contemplating and overthinking, I’m finally taking a step in the right direction to do the things I want to do. At first, I wanted to beat myself up for wasting so much time, but then I realized maybe the time just wasn’t right. Maybe I wasn’t mature enough yet, or maybe I didn’t know what would work best for my body. Either way, that doesn’t matter, what matters now is moving forward, having fun, and being just a little bit better each day.