…..I announced to my day job that I was leaving full-time employment to better-concentrate on my growing martial arts school.
Wow. I actually did it.
I often replay to myself a conversation with a former instructor of mine. He and I had become quite friends while our journeys were together, and we’d often have long discussions about out respective paths in martial arts. I remember that I once told him that as a family man, he taught because he had to put bread on the table for his wife & kids, and I taught (part-time) simply because I loved it. This was almost a running joke between the two of us for many years.
I moved back to Houston, Texas in December of 2007, just 3 scant months after testing for 4th Dan. As I had chosen to move to a southern part of the city, I was very much without a place to train, and resigned myself to self-maintenance when time allowed as I concentrated on my day-time job more. Still, the words of Choong Jae Nim CS Kim continued to ring in my ears: don’t stop training. I trained alone for more than a year.
Getting this changed a lot of things....but it would be another couple of years before I realized just how those changes would affect me.
Solo training, mind you, takes an incredible amount of self-discipline. I can say that now with conviction because I’ve done it. Just ask my wife how many times I would get up ahead of the rest of the family in order to trek out to the local high-school track and go through the material that I’d spent the past 14+ years trying to perfect. One of the key aspects of martial arts training is that it comes with its own support group (that’s a quote from one of my students). The camaraderie is one of the things that keeps you coming back to class. While I missed that aspect terribly during my “hiatus”, the need to continue training had actually outgrown it, and I knew I had to keep going. Conversations with Grandmaster CS Kim had led me to believe that as a newly-promoted master, I had a responsibility to continue training.
Things changed in the summer of 2009 when someone walked up to me at the track and asked about the exercises I was doing. Before I knew it, a conversation had started about Tang Soo Do, resulting in my first student, who trained for free simply because I needed to keep my instructor’s skills sharp. Less than a month later, through a mutual friend, I was introduced to my second student. We immediately made friends and she started training with me as well, providing space to practice at her place of business. Finally, that avenue to once again express myself as in instructor had returned.
Over that past two years, I’ve seen this thing grow from what was largely just a small club to a genuine school of martial arts. It’s a journey that hasn’t been without sacrifice. In 2010, I was returned to shift work at the day job, which meant 12 hour days at work, which would sometimes be followed by teaching at the school afterwards. It would have been easy to put the school on hiatus until I figured this out. I decided to train through it instead. Looking back, I’ve almost gotten used to 17 hour days…..
Now here I sit, on the threshold of joining the ranks of many of my contemporaries, and finally ready to dedicate myself full-time to the way I give back to the world: teaching Traditional Tang Soo Do. Once again, I return to that conversation I had with my instructor so many years ago….and I can smile about it. I have often repeated that Choong Jae Nim once told me to “teach from the heart and the students will come to you”. I think I’m finally starting to figure out what that means. Express your love of teaching first….and it’s what you really want to do, then the universe will conspire to make things happen for you.
A pic from outside our new home in 2011.....I didn't create Texas Coast Karate. It just happened.
….well, things are happening. Texas Coast Karate opens its doors full time in January, 2012. Let’s see how far I can take this thing……
(Master) Wayne Boozer
