One of the more startling things I took away from my second-to-last conversation with my old Sensei – one of the things that made it the second-to-last conversation (see The Schism ) – was when she asked me how I was incorporating karate into my life outside the dojo. It is a good question, but what startled me was that my sensei even had to ask it. It showed how far apart we had become in our practice and how little involvement they had in my day-to-day. Let me start with inside the dojo – we were a few years into COVID at the time of this conversation so my training was entirely in my home dojo, a space that she had seen pictures of and could see it was quite spacious. I was reviewing kata and bunkai every night after my kids went to bed in preparation for my sandan exam so karate was pretty front-and-center in my life at that time. However, karate was still a major part of my life in the years before COVID. I had joined a local Goju-ryu dojo that trained once a week for a ...
Just a nobody, training in karate