Improvement

I've been a 2nd-degree black belt for a while now.  I've been the most-senior member of SJT for several years now, too.

Those are pretty good things!  So why try to do more?  Well for me, I can't stand being stagnant.  The idea of improvement excites me.  Because I want to inspire others to try harder, too.  All of it.

The hard part is that improvement at my level isn't always easy.  I pretty much made it to 2nd-degree black belt on ability, but now that we're under a new parent dojo, testing rules changed.  It got a lot harder.  I blogged about failing my test for 3rd a few years back.  It's still going to be difficult to test again, but I want to keep working on it.

In taiko, I can play almost every spot in every song in our repertoire and have experienced so much simply by being there for so long.  My improvement comes in small increments in practice, and it's hard to find time to get it from outside the group, but I want to keep working on it.

Naturally, there are times when I'm happy to coast a bit - life happens and sometimes it's nice to relax a little.  But I don't accept that where I am now is "good enough" just because I'm doing well or have done a lot so far.  Taking on a hard task just for the sake of getting better isn't always comfortable, but to me, the alternative is worse.

This is in no way a judgement of anyone else or any other path that others might take.  This is me and my path.  I hope that I inspire others to try to do more and to let people know that more is out there for them, even when it's daunting or uncomfortable.


So here's to 2016 and whatever growth I may find!