In honor of the Black Belt Club Celebration coming in September, here is a featured Black Belt Club Application.
What is your favorite part of being a black belt?
The short answer, everything. I’ve been a black belt for more than fifteen years. I’ve been a master for more than half a decade. I’ve taught students with all kinds of backgrounds and challenges and students who have all kinds of different reasons for studying martial arts. I love getting to teach because everyone has a different journey and so many of my teachers were so important to me. I could write a book on how fortunate I’ve been to learn from Master Joan, but a thousand pages later there is no way I’d be able to do her justice. And she is not the only teacher I’ve been lucky to have. I try to honor them by being as good a teacher as I can be. On good days I feel like I’m headed in the right direction with that.
I spend a lot of time trying to understand my material better because that’s one of the ways to become a better teacher. It also happens to be a really good way to get better at that material. That is one of the other things I love about being a black belt, I keep finding new things in old material. It’s a little bit like being an explorer, adventuring into the hidden depths of a form to see what I can discover. (I spent a lot of time talking about that process in a previous blog post). I love that I’m responsible for more than just replicating the material, I’m responsible for discoveries. Anything I discover could help another student (whether I discover by accident or thorough experimentation). Every one of those discoveries I can give to a student so they don’t have to find it the hard way, they’ll go exploring already knowing it. Then they can spend their time making new discoveries, stuff I didn’t get to find. So they can be better than me. I truly believe the goal of a great instructor is to produce a student better than them. On good days I feel like I’m headed in the right direction with that too.
I also love meeting with other black belts from other schools and other traditions and learning from their discoveries. Their instructor will have shaped them differently. Their explorations will have brought them different gems. So all of that rich history that they have from their journey can give me some wonderful shiny new stuff. I realize that sometimes instructors talk about new techniques and material a lot like I used to talk about toys or video games with as a kid. Like we’ve all got these toy boxes that we are filling up with as many awesome things as we can find. Only the more people I get to work with the more I realize I don’t know, so the more modest my toy box seems. Written down it seems like that should be an overwhelming feeling. Truthfully though it’s exciting, like exploring space. It’s like being in the biggest sand box in the world. Or your first time at Disney Land, where every time you turn around there’s something more awesome that you hadn’t noticed. I realize that my analogies are pretty slanted towards the point of view of people under the age of ten (and that doesn’t really bother me).
Truthfully though, if I had to pick one thing as my favorite thing about being a black belt, it’s being a black belt. Once you become a black belt, you never stop being a black belt, not ever. It’s not something you have. It’s not milk, it doesn’t expire or go bad. It’s not a phone, it doesn’t become outmoded or useless. It’s knowledge. It’s something that no one can take away from me. More important than that, I can share it with as many people as I want and never run out. Knowledge is one of the only things you still have after you’ve given it to someone else (this happens to be my favorite thing about knowledge). So there you have it, my favorite part of being a black belt is being a black belt.