As I mentioned earlier this week in Do or Do Not, There is No Try, I went on a taekwondo retreat with my kids in Pennsylvania. While they certainly were excited to go, I was dreading it! Maybe on some level that is why I did the juicing on the 1st day of the retreat, so that I would be forced to spend more time in the bathroom and less time with strangers making small talk. For me, it just was not advertised as something that would be much fun…between the unheated cabins, which I was sharing with my kids and another family I had never met before, to the group activities with teenagers, to the two hour motivational speaker seminar, to the no cell phone policy, and to the fact that we were required to wear a crispy new bright white Taekwondo uniform that prides itself in its unflattering husky cut and it’s uncanny ability to trap heat in its thick unbreathable cotton/polyester weave. I was far from excited. But once I got there, I realized that I had a decision to make…I could hide in the cabin texting anyone who would respond and just wait for time to pass, or I could dig deep to find my inner dragon and play along. I decided to play along and this is what I learned:
Taekwondo is not for me. While I really like practicing the self-defense moves because I have now learned how to take someone down that is bigger than me (such an awesome feeling!) and how to break a board with my bare hand (so gratifying!), it does take a lot of time to advance to the next level and I am impatient (family trait) and need immediate gratification (another family trait). There is also a lot of mediating, which I don’t do because I can’t sit still for long. I keep thinking about all the things I could be doing, like conquering my to-do list, or would rather be doing, like really anything. I don’t have time to meditate and deeply ponder my feelings and think about making decisions, however big or small. I make a decision, I move on. And while I might be able to get past those things, I can’t get past calling someone sir or ma’am, or worse, being called ma’am. Nor can I get over asking for permission to speak. I have opinions (many), thoughts to share (lots), funny stories to tell (infinite), and not one of those should ever or will ever start with “permission to speak, sir/ma’am?” Conversations should have flow, a back-and-forth, a rhythm, and parties should be equal. When you have to ask permission, one has power, there is no flow in the conversation, no warmth or genuineness. It’s cold and militant and it makes me feel inferior and submissive. It makes me not feel like me, and that’s not ok.
Despite my feelings, I secretly wanted to be good at it. If I am going to be completely honest here, since I had decided to go all in and let my guard down for the weekend, I silently started to get pretty competitive and was quickly looking to be the best untrained martial artist of the weekend. Since my kids were off doing their own activities, it was just me. I started to envision the other students, and especially the masters, picking up on my natural abilities and whispering to each other “Wow, nice kicks!”, “Look at that focus!”, “Who is THAT?” Once I committed to it, putting myself out there, the least they could do was recognize my efforts with a small token of appreciation, maybe some kind words. And at the end of the second day, when no one presented me with an honorary black belt, I questioned their judgement and I found myself thinking “Well I know why I don’t want you (see above), but why don’t you want me? Didn’t you see me out there? Didn’t you see my focus?” In hindsight it’s probably better this way. It would be so embarrassing for them when I told them that my heart wasn’t in it, and I was only in it for the belt.
I will never write my own eulogy. During the two hour mandatory seminar that all the non-graduating students had to participate in, the last exercise that we had to do was write our own eulogy. Up to this point I had done everything that was asked of me, but I could not do this, and I couldn’t believe anyone would do it. Much to my surprise, not only did most do it, one woman actually read hers to the entire group so that she could get a free book (must be a really good book). I tend to live my life through headlines, and I am definitely superstitious. So when asked to do this, all I could hear was Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie from the Today show saying, “Up next, how a healthy New York woman predicted her own death by writing her own eulogy just a day before she died,” and I worried that I would crash my car on the way home from the retreat. I do realize that I sound crazy, and that if I got into an accident on the way home it would mostly likely not, probably not, really absolutely not have any connection to whether or not I wrote my own eulogy. But why even go there and tempt fate?