Boiling Water

Your karate teacher doesn’t care if you showed up yesterday or missed last week.

They only care that you’re here now.

… and that you paid your tuition.

Because the karate teacher doesn’t know what you have going on out there.

Let’s face it — you have a million things.

And they have just the one.

But that one is heavy.

That’s where your tuition comes in.

Gichin Funakoshi said karate is like boiling water — it cools quickly when you take it from the flame.

But he didn’t mean it the way we usually hear it.

Not as a warning that you can’t slow down.

Not as a demand that there’s no room for rest, regression, or shifting focus when life requires it.

Karate isn’t going anywhere.

Sometimes people have to.

Funakoshi wasn’t talking about days or weeks.

He meant keep karate in your heart,

so it boils again quickly when you return —

even if you’re just stumbling back in.

Karate kept close to the heart never really cools.

Sometimes it pays to save fuel and use it for other things.

And when you’re ready,

karate will be ready too.

It won’t care that you got fat.

It won’t care that you can’t kick as high.

Karate fits everywhere, at every stage of life —

we just train it for different reasons.

Sure, you forget things.

Your instincts dull.

Your timing slips.

But if you did it long enough,

those movements never leave you.

The instinct is still there —

just buried.

You never really walk away from karate.

How could you?

All your friends are there.

And there’s something strange about the people who walk this path.

We do it in seasons.

We give reasons that sound like excuses —

mostly because we don’t really know why it feels so good.

It taps into movement and instinct

we were always meant to have.

Lost to modernization,

but still necessary all the same.

Karate doesn’t just make you tougher.

It makes you sharper —

in every walk of life.

You focus more.

Time slows down.

You see things more clearly,

even when you can’t always explain what you’re seeing.

So don’t worry about where you’ve been.

Just make your way back to the dojo…

when you can.