HIS Karate-Do

As most of you know, this is my favorite time of year – I love spending Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year with family and friends. It’s a time of renewing relationships, reminiscing, and preparing for the year to come. For those of us in the workplace (or schoolplace), it’s the only time of the year where a slew of mandatory holidays and liberal leave policies allow most of us to spend time away from the usual grind. Like that old Coca-Cola advertisement saying, it’s….”The pause that refreshes.” Of course, in addition to being the season of good cheer and bowl games, this is also prime cold/flu season. For many karateka, it also happens to be the time of year that contains the most interruptions to the annual training routine. Hence, we’ll be missing practice on three out of four Saturdays in the coming few weeks (11 Dec, 25 Dec and 1 Jan). For most of us, that’ll be a good time of refreshment and reflection. Unfortunately, there can also be some negative effects of the holidays which don’t normally show up till some time later. For example, ever notice how a bad cold will creep in following these good [...]

The word “times” is not used all that often anymore. It’s one of those words that really sounds strange, the more you say it to yourself…times, times, times. We use it to denote multiplication, like the times table or 2 times 4 equals 8. There’s that old phrase, “Keeping up with the times.” Way back, I think it had a more “timely” connotation, like being modern and up-to-date. We still see great newspapers that imply being current, like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, etc. Locally, there’s still the Times Supermarket; which I guess, meant that it was a modern supermarket, part of a new trend replacing the old Mom and Pop grocery stores. As a kid, playing “Chase Master”, we’d yell out “times!” when we were tired or winded, to indicate a time-out. But, as usual, I digress – since I actually wanted to discuss the changing times and how I have come to realize that I’m getting older and seem to be a bit behind the times. Time is a personal thing, time is a relative thing. It means different things to people at different times in their lives. When we talk about it, we all [...]

When I was a kid growing up in Pearl City, folks used to say that PC had some of the best drinking water, straight from the tap. I don’t know if that’s true, but my usual way of slaking thirst was to go up to the faucet, cup my hand, and drink my fill of cool water, standing at the kitchen sink. Guess what? I never do that anymore. That was years before we worried about “stuff” in the tap water, decades before the advent of drinking from water bottles or having a high-tech filter affixed right onto the faucet. Nowadays, I fill my glass with chilled water straight from – my refrigerator dispenser (I change the filter cartridge every 6 months). My, how things have changed over the years, even the simple act of drinking water. Ironically, nowadays, beer drinkers would rather have their brew come straight from the “tap” versus from a bottle, haha. In a smooth segueway from slaking a parched, dry throat to quenching a thirsty karate mind, I now shift to the striking image of having a nice sip of water from…the fire hydrant! );0…I’m talking about the incredibly large body of “stuff” there is [...]