It must have been the year the World Cup fever swept the nation — 2002. I was in my early thirties. As always, I was in the gym in my dogi, sweating it out, throwing punches and kicks with everything I had.
“Hey, brother! Let’s spar for old times’ sake!”
A junior of mine asked to spar. I agreed without a second thought.
“Look at you, kid! You’ve really grown up!”
But that sparring match ended up posing a huge question about my path in martial arts.
I remember I was fifteen, in ninth grade. A flyer for a kung fu club, stuck to a utility pole, caught my eye. It was a crude, black-and-white flyer, but somehow it dragged me straight into that kung fu gym.
At fifteen, I was very small. My body was frail, and I wasn’t even 150cm tall. I suppose that, being a boy despite it all, some part of me wanted to become strong.
That’s how my hunger for martial arts, which began with kung fu, led me from one gym to another. It was the first step of a life that continues, even now, with me sweating it out in a dojang every single day in my dogi.
Back to the sparring match. When it was over, my whole body ached. The junior who’d asked me to spar had just finished his military service. I had been coaching him since he was in high school. By the time he asked me to spar, he had grown into a strapping young man. At the time, I had been training in striking-based martial arts every single day for over fifteen years. And yet, past thirty, I found myself feeling the weight of sparring with a strong 23-year-old.
By the time I turn forty, I’ll have nearly thirty years of martial arts experience under my belt — but will I still be able to share the mat with a strapping 23-year-old who hasn’t even trained for ten years? And what happens once I’m past fifty??
Would I end up like so many seniors before me, clinging to the glory days and saying “back in my time, I used to…”? It weighed on me. It felt like standing in front of a massive wall. That thirst led me down a new martial path.
I had trained for years under the saying, “A martial artist should be strong against the strong, and gentle toward the weak.” Could I really be strong against the strong, and gentle toward the weak? It was a question I asked myself again and again.
To be strong against someone strong, I had to become stronger than they were — but doing so inevitably turned them into someone weaker than me. Isn’t all this training meant to overcome the strong, in the end, just a means of turning everyone into the weak?
I wanted an answer. Two years later, I met the teacher I train under today — Chairman Yoon Dae-hyun of the Korea Aikido Association. Through him, I was able to encounter a new martial art, and through him, I continue learning it to this day.
Amid all that frustration and emptiness, this martial art came to me like rain after a long drought, like a well that quenched a burning thirst.
I set aside the dogi and black belt I had worn until then, put on a white belt once again, and started over from the very beginning.
Another fifteen years have passed since then. I still don’t know exactly what the more precise answer is.
What I do know for certain is that martial arts — budo — aren’t purely about becoming strong.
Even now, I visit the dojang every day in search of a more precise answer, training and sweating alongside many adults, and continuing to visit my teacher to keep learning.
It’s now been over thirty years since I began training in martial arts. There’s still so much to learn, and I still get scolded plenty by my teacher for not getting it right, but I don’t intend to stop. Or rather, it seems I can’t stop. Because the thirst still hasn’t been quenched.
November, 2017
