My first remembered experience with the martial arts was probably when I was about six or seven years old. Some of my friends from the neighborhood had been taking Karate and they showed me the basic punching that Shotokan Karate uses while we were playing around in my backyard. I don´t know exactly why that memory has stuck with me all these years, but it made an impression that stays with me even today. I also distinctly remember that another friend´s father was very big into Karate. We would go down to his house and his father had heavy bags sitting in the garage that had blood on them from punching and kicking them without gloves or padding on his hands and feet.
I also distinctly remember the displeasure that my mother voiced when I took a flyer for a local Karate school from a passerby while I was sitting in the car waiting for her to come out of a store (I was probably 11 or 12 at the time). In addition to the fact that I had conversed with the guy (who could have kidnapped me!!) the idea of getting beat up in Karate did not seem to sit well with her, or my father for that matter.
Later in high school many of my friends were interested in the martial arts. We were all kind of on common ground in that none of us was very good at any martial art, but we were all interested. Along with another friend I signed up for my high school´s Aikido class and the next semester for a Karate class. Needless to say, I wasn´t in the best of shape and being as this was Hawaii in an un-airconditioned gym I was wiped out by the Karate classes. The Aikido classes were a little bit more my speed at the time as there was not nearly as much physical exertion. It was an enlightening experience, despite my lack of physical prowess I knew that I wanted to take some sort of martial art, I just did not really know what I wanted to pursue or why.
Later in my high school years, being the ambitious sort that I am, I got a job working at the Mcdonalds in our local mall. There was a video arcade right across from there that I would frequent with great regularity and eventually I made friends with some of the guys working there. This was right about the time that the Street Fighter II craze hit the video arcades and Genesis and Nintendo 8 bit were the big things.
When I turned 18, I got a job at the arcade (another ambitious career move) as they didn´t hire anyone below that age for some reason that I don´t remember, I think it was the money handling or something related to that. Right after I got the job, but before I started actually working, I was playing Street Fighter II against a kid at the arcade and I was beating him silly using an annoying pattern of moves that he could not defeat (use what works right?). He took offense to my strategy and proceeded to unplug the game from the wall essentially losing me 50 cents. Well, I wasn´t going to take that lying down of course and I got right up in his face and started yelling various things, but the one important thing that I said (as I was shoving him) was, "What are you going to do, hit me?" Well of course he did just that, cold cocked me a good one right on the side of my face. After much scuffling and and much bleeding on my part we were separated and I had learned a valuable lesson. What was that lesson? "Don´t ask for it cause you will get it," I think sums it up pretty well. Dammit, 50 cents was big money when you work at Mcd´s though!
A few days later I had to go to my graduation and explain to various friends how "You should see what I did to the other guy!" right, ha ha. Not a scratch on him is what you would have seen. So, I came back to work at the arcade during the summer under somewhat cloudy auspices. Needless to say I was a bit nervous whenever I saw that guy, even though he had been kicked out of the place for a year. The manager of the arcade was a no nonsense guy named Vincent. Vincent was not a large man, but he provided a firm hand in dealing with the kids that frequented the place. Needless to say we were more concerned about the 2000 dollar machine than the customer that was kicking the shit out of it because he lost his quarter and didn´t feel the need to call one of us to help him get it out. It was one of the few service industries in which the customer was not always right.
Vincent and I had many conversations over the course of my employment there and became friends as I was one of the few people that he was not forced to fire for lack of productivity or dishonesty. I don´t remember exactly when we got on the subject of martial arts, but eventually it came to light that he was quite an accomplished martial artist and in a show of friendship or to some degree pity based on my earlier experience in the arcade, he agreed to teach me Kung-Fu.
To say that I was a poor physical specimen at the time would be an understatement.
Things kind of went like this,
Sifu: "Okay, try doing a snap kick, like this," he demonstrates.
Me: "Hi ya!" futilely kicking.
Sifu: "You´re kidding right?"
You get the picture. Sifu was very patient though and over the course of several years I improved significantly.
So, what does this martial art mean to me? I think in a way it has added to my life and become a part of it. I don´t practice Kung-Fu so much as I live it or try to. What do I mean when I say that? Well, Kung-Fu has made me look at life in a much different way than I used to. One thing that it has made me aware of it the fragility of life itself. Anytime I find myself in a situation where I might have to use physical force I am acutely aware that I could kill someone, and this has made it much easier to avoid those situations. Ego is the prime motivator in most physical confrontations and that doesn´t really factor in for me anymore.
Kung-Fu has also made me aware of how the mind and body are inextricably linked. Most of the obstacles that I have had to overcome in Kung-Fu were not physical so much as mental, my fear of the unknown kept me from realizing my full potential. I still struggle with this everyday, but the knowledge that I have acquired makes those obstacles less and less of a problem. I could go on, but I would like to address one final point on the nature of martial arts.
Martial artists are in general (not everyone) a very secular bunch. A lot of this can be attributed to a certain amount of insecurity that the martial arts tends to bring out in people. When people devote themselves to a particular art they want to believe that what they are doing has merit and value. For many martial artists measuring this value means that they should be able to beat up people that take styles different from their own or do things differently from them. They want to believe that their way is the best way and this is the only way they can prove it to themselves. This is of course wrong. The martial arts are not all about beating people up. The word art in there has a purpose. There is merit in learning a martial art for the sake of the art itself. There is beauty in a form or kata, a kick or punch does not have to hit someone to be seen as well done. There is no best way. There can only be the best way for you. Experience as much as you can from life and the martial arts so you can find that way.
-Harvey Meeker-