I do not expect every one of you to read this fully, for it is a long post, but I would appreciate it if you did. Thanks!
Well, the final day of the mastery program is upon us. Tomorrow will be August 16th, 2014, which is one year after I recorded my first good deed. One year after I wrote my first blogpost, my first goal, and recorded my first sparring minutes. As sensei tells us, how awesome would it be to say, "I got my black belt, but from 8 years of intense training, and a year long mastery program with these requirements.."
Most of you who have done the requirements should now realize, you have done ALL of those push-ups. You have done ALL of those good turns. YOU have done ALL of what it takes to complete this program. And I congratulate you.
I wanted to thank each and every one of you for taking part in this with me, this experience has truly been eye opening, and I am extremely glad that I was able to complete this with you guys.
Now I would like to summarize my good deeds. Every week, I had to perform 20 good deeds, no matter how big or how small. At the beginning of this program, I was merely doing these good deeds without intent, just knowing that I had to complete them in order to fulfill the requirements of the mastery program. However about 2 months into it, I had discovered how happy these good deeds actually made people. One time, I held a door for a family of 5, and the father shook my hand saying I was being a great influence on my generation in the community. I was shocked. After that moment, I began doing these good deeds from my heart, realizing that not just me, but anyone can make a difference by lending a hand, holding a door, and much more. Now not every week was exactly 20. Some weeks it went down to 17, for various reasons. When this happened, I made it my weekly goal to make up those lost good deeds along with the other 20 I had to complete, no excuses. By doing this I was able to keep up my good deeds throughout the year, and now I am proud to say that I have completed 1000 good deeds over the course of this year.
The hardest part of this program in my opinion, was the physical requirements. Now most of you would wonder, really? This is karate it's mainly physical! Yes, this is true, but I have horrible organizational skills, or should I say "had". Having to do 100 push-ups AND sit-ups, 14 pull-ups, 28 squats, and all of my forms 3 times a week or more, is very hard to suddenly fit into your schedule. I very quickly learned that I had to get with it, or else I would have a huge debt of exercises to complete. So thus, my organizational and scheduling skills increased quickly. Now I know that all of you know the numbers, but for documentation sake, I am incredibly proud of myself in that I was able to do 36,500 push-ups AND sit-ups, 5000 pull-ups, and 10,000 squats throughout this year, along with 150 repetitions of each learned form.
Righting one wrong was an interesting experience. It was awkward, it felt off, and it was difficult. If some of you don't know, talking to your ex can be a very weird situation. Not only does it make you feel weird as you talk to him/her, but it just doesn't feel right. At the end of our conversation, everything felt right, because I was able to apologize and own up to my mistakes, of which she accepted my apology fully.
Together, my father and I were able to raise over 400 dollars for the Alabama project, but unfortunately were not able to participate last year. I hope to join the other participants this year, because I have heard so many great things about it.
In my recent blog posts, I had profiled 3 living heroes. Those individuals were Nicholas Vujicic, Dave Grohl, and Shaun White. I won't go into detail, but I had described why each of them were living heroes to me, and how they had impacted the world.
Earlier in the year, I had achieved my 3 personal victories. They are also in blog posts, but not as recent. I again won't go into detail, so if you want to see those, you can scroll down the numerous blog posts of this program to find them.
At the moment I am reading Zen in the Martial Arts, which is the required reading for the program, and I will complete it by tomorrow. So far I find it incredibly educational, but not in a bad way. I am already beginning to internalize some of the lessons from the book to be used in my own daily life.
And finally, I have had to maintain a public journal (this blog) for the year. Updated at least once a week. At the beginning of the program, I did not do well with this at all. It was to the point where sensei eventually emailed all of us, telling us to step up our game, with no excuses to not blog. From then on I got a little better at being on time, yet there was still some holes in my performance. I would miss a week, or two occasionally, which was not acceptable. In the last 5 months, I believe I was able to maintain my blogging consistently, besides the 3 weeks in july when I was at camp. Now I find that blogging is a great source for letting out emotion and anything on your mind if you are willing to share it to the world.
Again, I wanted to thank each and every participant of this program for joining me on this journey. I was challenged greatly but also had tremendous amounts of fun at the same time. As the last day of the program approaches, I congratulate all of you, we made it.
- Jake Landgrebe
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