Always Open
I began practicing the martial arts when I was a small child. For years, I trained hard, practicing late at night in a garage my parents transformed into my own personal dojo. There, I would punch and kick for hours and hours every day. Back then, I didn’t have any real responsibilities, so I had time to do whatever I wanted, and I spent all of my time training.
As we get older, life presents more responsibilities. We have jobs, a partner; maybe children who need our love, time, and energy. This can make it hard to get to the dojo to practice. My work required me to move around the country, and often, I found myself in remote towns where there was no place to train. Martial arts skills are highly perishable, and once you’ve been out of practice for a while, it can be really tough to get back into training. This can leave you with a feeling of frustration, and even sadness, for not doing what you love, and not having the time or place to do it.
Several years ago, I was living in a small city where there was no dojo. I took some vacation time to train with my teachers in Japan and I remember expressing my irritation to one of my Sensei. I think he understood what I was feeling because he stopped, looked at me seriously, and said, “Michael-san, never forget the dojo is always open.” He was relaying an important lesson that some things we want are not accessible, not because they don’t exist, but because we seem to forget they do. When we are ready or able to change our focus and priorities, we find the things we wanted were within our reach all along. Often, the only thing standing between us and our goals is, well, us.
Today, I almost skipped my customary evening walk through the woods. It was a busy day at the house and my wife was gone for the evening. Since she had an early morning class in the city, we decided she should stay at a bed-and-breakfast overnight to avoid the long, early morning commute. My work had been busy with some major deadlines and I was stuck at my desk all day reading through hundreds of pages of reports. Once six o’clock arrived, I wanted to get off of my computer and take a moment to decompress.
A walk sounded like the perfect medicine, but it was raining outside and the sun was already sinking toward the horizon. I reassured myself that the forest would be there tomorrow and that I should just skip my evening walk. There was that familiar feeling of wanting to do something I loved, wanting to be somewhere meaningful, but in all the wrong conditions. As if the stress from work wasn’t bad enough, going for a hasty walk in the rain didn’t sound relaxing, while missing the walk sounded unpleasant, too. Humans are great at taking something remarkably simple and twisting it into something unremarkably complicated.
“ Humans are great at taking something remarkably simple and twisting it into something unremarkably complicated.”
I took a deep breath, grabbed my raincoat and hat; slipped into my boots and headed out the front door. I figured I’d test the weather and perhaps walk a few hundred feet into the pine grove on the east side of the property. Within two minutes, on the edge of a nearby tobacco field, I spotted a small herd of deer. We stared at each other for about 30 seconds when a doe snorted, signaling the herd it was time to leave. As the deer ran off in their long, jumping strides, with their white tails pointed up to the sky, I thought I saw a small fawn running near the tree line. This is birthing season, and recently, I’d seen several pregnant does on my trail cameras. However, I hadn’t yet seen any signs of fawns, other than a lone doe that was hanging around a few hundred yards from the house. I suspected she had a fawn bedded in the area.
After the deer left, I felt re-energized. It was raining, but it felt great to be in the woods. The weather was cool, and the pitter-patter of raindrops falling on the forest floor, along with the strong petrichor, brought instant calm. I turned onto my favorite trailhead, where I have a trail camera posted, stopped to review the footage, and to my surprise, there were several videos of the doe with her brand new fawn; spotted, restless and spry. I hadn’t been outside for more that five or six minutes, and the forest had already pulled me away from life’s stresses into a space of focused quietude. I continued along my normal trail route, hiking in the rain, thinking about what my teacher told me about the dojo always being open. The forest, it seems, is always open, too.