A Change of Pace and Merry Christmas..

I’m going to do something a little different this time around, I’m going to tell you a little bit about what I’ve been thinking and absorbing vs. just what I’ve seen. The reason for this is it’s Christmas, I’m missing my family and friends for the first time in my life during this time of year, and this is the time of year I feel like I catch up with all my friends from around the country and the world and we have our annual deep Christmas conversations. These conversations usually hold me over for about a year until I get to have them again the Christmas after that.

So, it’s been 6 months, it seems like 6 lives. I’ve eaten live octopus in Korea, I’ve seen cock fights in the Philippines, I’ve climbed the Himalaya mountains, I’ve trained and lived with the Shaolin monks, I was completely awed by Tibet, I hung out with monkeys and elephants in Nepal, and I’ve finally just stopped to think about all of it for a little while and just not do anything at all for a few days in Taiwan. Not too shabby. Of course the people I have met are the best parts. I have encountered travelers not unlike myself, people running from things, people running to things, and people just doing what they always wanted to do. I’ve made some life long friends from some pretty far out places. I’ve met some really awesome locals from every country and interacted with monks and martial arts masters. Writing down my thoughts on all of this is like trying to draw every star in the sky, there’s just too many.

Mainly, if anything had to come of any of this, it is that being a part of life, getting to share with people from everywhere, is overwhelmingly motivating. Some days I just want to run out the door and down the street and change the world and create things and leave my mark everywhere, ha, but I keep my head and my pace. Right before I left my friend Josh from UC and I were talking, and he told me this exactly, “Throughout…I’ve lost some very close friends very young. It just makes you realize that, if you have to do something, do it now. Otherwise, it’s going to be too late.” And I think about that everyday. Of all of the people I’ve met that I’ve deemed amazing, they all shared one quality, they are do-ers. They get an idea, they have a dream, they find their passion and they do it. In China, but especially Nepal and Tibet, I got to experience a lot of Buddhism. Buddha once said, “Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it." And it seems that it proves true in all the masters of life that I’ve met. My 92 year old Grandmaster Cacoy, the only 12th degree black belt in the world, loves to tell me all his secrets of life, secrets to life. He told me you must maintain a routine, you must constantly with all your energy pursue whatever it is that drives you, and you must find where there is no more to learn, and then you must change and go beyond that. He told me, “You know why I never lost, because I never stopped exploring, inventing, changing, learning, adapting, and pushing myself to find answers to questions no thought to ask. I had to invent questions, I had to change, I still do, I’m always changing once I’ve found an answer.” He said, “Once my wife told me I did martial arts too much, that I should not train so much, that maybe I should try something different. So I quit martial arts for about two weeks, and I gambled, played cards, drank liquor, which I never did, went to cock fights, stayed up late and got fat. When those 2 weeks were up my wife came to me and she said maybe you should start doing martial arts again and I never drank again.” Of course all of his stories end with his old Yoda chuckle.

When I lived with Shifu Hu, my kung fu master and Buddhist teacher, in the Shaolin Temple he taught me other lessons about life. He taught me about, “eating bitter.” Life is tough, no one can doubt that, and as I’ve traveled, especially in 3rd world countries I’ve seen poverty I’d never imagined. I passed by whole families, with naked children and week old babies, sleeping on pages of newspaper on the sidewalk with no blankets. Most of Shifu Hu’s students that he has taken in to live in his school are poor. Some were abandoned, some were delivered by their families hoping to give them a better chance to be anything in life. Shifu Hu said in each boy he looks for respectfulness and a willingness to "eat bitterness," learning to welcome hardship, using it to discipline the will and forge character. He said nothing is more important than character. These kids, some 4 or 5, train around 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in grueling kung fu, on top of that with schooling, and they all live in one barracks like compound in bunk beds, sleep on a thick blanket over a board, and each have 2 pairs of clothes. They have no heat, no air conditioning, almost nothing of entertaining value, and they never, ever, complain. They exist in a world beyond our mean for comfort and satisfaction, a peace of mind a lot of people pray for. Master Hu told me, “some day these boys will leave, they will go on and have jobs and lives, and things may get difficult, they will encounter hardships, but they will look back at their Shaolin training and realize nothing harder will ever exist. They will push forward and overcome.”
“The most important thing is to build character, to make a good person. For these 200 kids I have to be a dad and a mom with my small group of coaches, (all of whom are former students). It’s more than Kung Fu, it’s life, and the most important thing you have to teach them is how to live a good life, to be happy, to make the most of what they have, and to have a rich life. True Kung Fu is much more than physique and building a strong body, it is building a strong life. It’s mastering whatever you set out to do in life.”
Then Shifu Hu told me this story:
“There once was a warrior that went town to town challenging the best fighters, and he defeated them all one by one. Every town he came to he was unwelcome for the people knew no one could beat him and he would leave only after defeating their best warriors. One day he came to a town and as he did asked to fight the best warrior. No one came forward, except for an old man. The warrior said, “Old man you offer me no challenge.” The old man said, “Can you do this?” And he turned his hand over very carefully in a circle. The warrior balked at him and said of course I can and rashly twisted his hand in the air. Then the old man said, “Warrior, can you do this?” The old man very carefully took a pot of boiling oil and poured it into a pipe no bigger than a straw. It was his charge of filling pipes with scalding hot oil for machinery. The warrior said of course I can, and took the pot away from the old man and tried four times to pour the oil and not once successfully was he able to pour it into the pipe. The warrior grew irritated and said this has nothing to do with combat, this is useless, this is not kung fu, and he got on his horse and left town. Four years later the warrior returned to town, bowed before the old man, called him master, and begged to be his student. The lesson is that true kung fu is not about combat, or strength, or force, or even fighting, it is about mastering any skill to it’s fullest, it is about mastering life.”
And these are some of the things I am blessed to hear, these are the things that I challenge myself to do and see. There is a band called The Smiths, they have a lyric, “Shyness is nice and shyness will stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to.” It’s proven to be true, the only things I have missed out on are the things I have been too reserved to do, questions I was to timid to ask natives and strangers.

It hasn’t always been easy, some days I never speak English to anyone, sometimes several days in a row. My friend Eugene told me when he moved home from Europe, “When you leave there will be days that you hate, you will be miserable and you will miss everything from home. But those days won’t last, and you have to remember all the awesome and amazing things you are seeing and doing will always out number the bad days.” He’s been right, the bad days always pass. In a hostel I read on a wall, “In the end it’s going to be okay, because if it’s not okay- it’s not the end.”

These are the things I think about when I quit moving long enough to think, when I remember enough to write down, and when I’m not too shy to ask questions to people I’ve just met. In the spirit of Christmas, I’m thinking about my family and friends, I miss and love you guys and hope you get everything you want during this holiday season. The last thing I wrote down that I read worth repeating is this, “Love everything all the time, because there is no other option.” Alright everybody, MERRY CHRISTMAS! -Stephen