HIS Karate-Do

In my excitement at coming back home, I forgot to remind everyone that this Saturday, 28 Oct, is one of our periodic rake days at Momilani Rec Ctr. I call it “rake day,” because what we normally need is a lot of hands (and rakes) to clean the grassy areas of the park from leaves, small branches, etc. Also, we can use about three guys to bring weedwhackers and work the corner area behind the pavillion… usually Sempai’s Robert, Rodney and I bring ours, but the Molina Sempais have a conflicting engagement that day, so another weedwhacker (person and machine, haha) would be helpful. As usual, we start right at 09:00 am and if we work productively, should finish shortly after 10:00 am. Please bring your gi’s… as we’ll likely have time for some quick training afterwards (and just in case rain forces a postponement of rake day, we can still train).

Well, we (Trish, Lynne and I) just got back from an enjoyable 5 days in….Vegas. My old Sensei, better known today by his students world-wide, as Shihan Funakoshi, was hosting his eighth world karate tournament in the city. This was to be his last tournament there, possibly the last one in the US . Next year, it’ll be held in England , and since his dojos are primarily located in Europe , likely to be on that continent from this time onward. Hence, it was probably our best and last chance to attend, not so much for the tournament, but to have the opportunity to train with Shihan. Of course, throughout the seventies and eighties, I had been able to train with Shihan many hundreds of times, but Trisha could only vaguely remember being his little white/blue belt student when she was six years old. So this was going to be a possibly last time for me to train with my old sensei and a first time for Trish to train in his advanced class as a black belt. It was a lot of fun, and I realized two things: 1) That much of what I share with our brown/black [...]

When I was still working in the IT industry, we would have a new slogan or motto every year. I remember one year, in the 1980’s, the motto was: “Partners In Change”. It was pretty appropriate, since we were busy reorganizing almost constantly, trying to remain the strong, dominant player we had been for the previous three decades. Of course, as regular employees, we felt ourselves to be mere peons within the huge, 500,000-employee, worldwide corporation. My own version of that year’s motto was: “Partners In Change…Small Change.” (Small change, get it?…like working for nickels and dimes) It used to get an appropriately small chuckle from my co-workers. Fast forward twenty years, and I was working for the US Army, as an employee in the Transformation Office, one of the highest priority initiatives and leading edge unit in the modern Army. Its meaning is far more than a motto, it represents a massive, Army-wide effort to address the complex, dangerous situations occurring today in global warfare. I firmly believe that the best things in life are truly transformational… a deep kind of change that gradually (sometimes suddenly) brings one to another level or direction. Two very common examples are: marriage [...]