The Lesson I'm Not Ready to Hear Yet

A different kind of Sunday. The rain arrived early and refused to leave, which turned out to be exactly what the day needed — a natural slowing, an enforced quietness that I hadn't known I was looking for until the weather made the decision for me.

I came away with intentions of training every day. So far, I have trained once, which was yesterday. These things happen.

The session itself started well enough. Inside, which I have never loved, but manageable. I picked up the fan, flicked it open — that sharp, percussive crack that sounds, if you don't know what's coming, remarkably like a gunshot — and apparently startled a young man across the room.

He told me, from a distance, that I had scared him and that I was being rude by making noise.

I told him I was sorry that loud sounds frightened him, but that it wasn't my problem.

He was young, and he needed to be right, and he kept going — pressing the point in his own language, not letting it settle. And somewhere in that moment, I very clearly wanted to punch him in the face. I will not dress that up or apologise for its honesty. It is what I felt, and it was not my finest moment, and I knew it at the time and felt certain about it anyway — which is its own kind of interesting information about where I still am.

I should have shown more control. I know that. I didn't, and there is a lesson somewhere inside the experience that I haven't fully located yet. Maybe it surfaces when I am ready for it. These things tend to.

Perhaps it is something about being in a crowded environment after weeks of relative solitude. Perhaps it is simply that I don't respond well to being spoken to that way by someone I don't know and will never understand. Perhaps both. Perhaps neither. Honestly, I don't know, and right now I don't particularly care — yet I know that I could have handled it better, and that handling it better is something worth working toward.

Training after that was average in the way that training always is when the mind is still elsewhere. I went through the motions, looking for a way out of my own head, searching for some small pocket of space or ease or enjoyment. The rain continued to fall. It didn't quite arrive.

And so another day passed, offering lessons I am still not entirely able to read, in a language I am clearly still learning.

Which, when I hold it at the right distance, is fine. More than fine. I am genuinely at peace with the fact that I still have a great deal to learn and a long way yet to travel.

The road being long is not a discouragement. It is, by now, the whole point.