Am I too old?
Am I too old? As I rolled out of bed at 5:07 am this morning to attend morning BJJ class, I asked myself this very question. “Am I too old for this?” Too old to wake up before the crack of stupid, to drive 30 min in the cold, all to take a thorough beat-down from a tribe of young lions? I thought this over the entire drive in, and I recalled this post I wrote not so long ago, when an older student (i.e. my age) asked about our Karate classes.
Original Post: Jan 12, '19
Why do those wizened old movie martial arts masters always answer questions with other questions? More personally, why am I starting to answer more and more questions from students with other questions? Am I getting lazy? Am I trying to empower the students to seek out the answers for themselves? Or am I just getting forgetful of the actual answers and trying to hide it? The answer is: probably a little of each.
Yesterday, an older gentleman asked if he was “too old for Karate”. I replied: “do you feel too old”? He wanted to try. I encouraged him. Last night he tried his first class, loved it, and signed up. The truth is, you are never too old to train in the martial arts. Yes, our older bodies can’t perform to the same level as when we were younger. Yes, we are more forgetful, our reflexes slow, flexibility reduces, etc, etc, blaa, blaa, blaa. It’s all nothing but noise and excuses! As long as we can move, we should exercise. We simply owe it to ourselves to live our highest quality life.
I answered yesterday’s question with a question because quite simply there were two opposing answers that were both 100% correct. If you tell yourself you can’t do something, for whatever ‘reason’/excuse, you will be right. If you tell yourself you can do something, well, then life gets fun. You may not achieve the mastery overnight that you would like, but you will get further then if you never tried in the first place.