A Different Part of the Cycle

It's been a hard week since returning to school. Whether that's the rain — constant, testing — or simply the weight of doing this for as long as I have, or a heart still half in Shenzhen, I can't say. Maybe it’s all three.

Things have just felt off. Low energy. Not enough laughter. A balance that at moments seems to belong to somebody else entirely.

Underneath it, I know this is only a different phase of the same cycle, the amazing stretches and the flat ones both belonging to the same turning wheel. My selfish wish, if I'm honest, is to master that cycle well enough to feel the downside without ever getting stuck inside it.

So today is a day to practise acceptance rather than expectation. A shift easy enough to hold in the mind and far harder to live daily. But two years in, I've learned that nothing worth having arrives easily. If you want it, you apply yourself. That's the whole principle of Kung Fu, and increasingly, of everything else.

I've seen the other version, the one where belief alone is supposed to be enough. Maybe that works for someone, somewhere. But everyone I actually admire got there by walking the harder path, over and over, toward something they refused to stop working for.

That's the version that makes sense to me. I practice. I improve. The better I get, the more I want to become. It feeds itself — a quiet, consuming cycle, the kind that pays out slowly, in a currency nobody else can see.

You just feel it.