I'm In Love With A Black Belt

I met my girlfriend, Jenn, 20 years ago while we were both training under KJN Ed Fong.

Let me rephrase that briefly.

I stumbled across the love of my life through a training accident while in the middle of a sparring class.  Stumbled, as in I walked into a brilliantly-timed side kick that knocked me back across the room and cracked a rib that's still sensitive even to this day.  It gave us a brief conversation, an "Are you okay?" moment, an icebreaker that I wouldn't have been able to manage otherwise because I was far too shy at the time.

From a certain point of view, it began because she left an impression on my heart that's never left me.

Our relationship was born amidst a lifestyle of learning to live and share the Martial Way.  As we grew together and it began to manifest in our lives, it also served to show me many of the things that I love most about her.  That's not because the training painted her into the person that she is, but because her heart has always been those colors.  The process of training simply helped two shy teenagers find the means to express the beauty of our souls and the insight to recognize it for what it is.

Through training, we've found our voice in the ways that we choose to serve the world.  It shows in different ways, and we don't always work on the same projects, but our support always shows through a deep mutual respect for the things that we choose to involve ourselves with.  That includes each other.

Our training in the arts dramatically enhanced the key lessons of the life training that we received from our families, transforming parental advice into a sense of purpose: make your life a constant process of personal evolution, striving to do whatever it takes in pursuit of what matters most.

We've also shown each other how we respond to challenges and problems.  Over two decades, we have both supported each other through numerous transitions: academic, professional, personal, family, political, philosophical, and far more.  Sometimes those things came packaged together with large quantities of confusion, frustrations, setbacks, and more - but we don't quit anything, especially us.

Our lives are not without challenge.  On the contrary, our lives test us severely at times, perhaps because, as author Paulo Coelho suggests, when you pursue your dreams as we do, life must test you in order to measure your readiness to realize those dreams.

Or perhaps, as our teachers in the arts have taught us: because living an authentic life is the test.

It is difficult to capture twenty years of this in a simple blog entry, but I hope that's a fair enough glimpse to connect you to what I'm getting at.  If you need to understand more, watch my life through a martial arts lens, a warrior's eyes - and beneath the surface of my actions and thoughts, in the place where I keep my innermost self, guarded within a deep reservoir of feeling, you will meet her, just as when you watch hers, you will find me.

I'm not saying this because I want you to begin dating out of your dojo - that's not the point.

I'm saying this because if you train to become the kind of person for somebody else that Jenn is to me (and never stop trying to improve that), then a life filled with love, laughter, friendship, and success isn't very hard to have....because when you bring light into another's life, they will light up yours.