Perseverance and Indomitable Spirit
Throughout my forty-two years on this planet, I have experienced many successes and even more failures than I would have ever thought possible. Having taken the time this year to reflect and take inventory on my past, in hopes to shape my present and future, I began to form a question in my mind; what is the value of working hard to successfully achieve a goal if the aftermath of such an achievement still brings failures and hardships? The successes and achievements in my life, while worthy of pursuit, did not alleviate the difficulties life brought to me afterwards.
I wondered how I could achieve feats of accomplishments that only few in this world could achieve and not have a life of ease and continued success. There are many philosophies that tout the journey as being the most important and not the destination. What, then, are the goals, accomplishments, and destinations along the journey meant for? In my true inquisitive fashion, I decided to search for answers in the examples of others. At the time of this writing, the April 26th anniversary of Mas Oyama’s just passed and I want to honor him and his Kyokushin Karate empire by focusing on examples from the legend himself and one of his legendary disciples.
Mas Oyama, the founder of the Kyokushin Karate style, has a mythical origin story that has captivated martial artists for decades. The legend says that after he trained extensively in both Shotokan and Goju Ryu Karate, he took inspiration from Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings and retreated to Mount Minobu in the Yamanashi Prefecture of Japan to train in isolation for fourteen months and, later, to Mount Kiyosumi in the Chiba Prefecture for another eighteen months. He returned to become a Japan Karate champion and founded Kyokushin Karate meaning “ultimate truth” (wikipedia.org, 2023). Even after such accomplishments, Mas Oyama endured hardships and criticism in his personal life and in bringing legitimacy to Kyokushin Karate in the highly political Japanese Karate world.
Judd Reid, in his book The Young Lions (2016), shares his journey in Kyokushin Karate and his time as an uchi deshi, or live-in student, for 1,000 days at the Kyokushin Karate headquarters in Japan under the tutelage of Sosai Mas Oyama. Shihan Reid’s training as an uchi deshi was brutal, painful, and required tremendous perseverance as well as an iron indomitable spirit. Hailed as one of the toughest martial arts courses, he was able to become the first Westerner to graduate Kyokushin Karate’s uchi deshi program. However, after enduring and overcoming so much, Shihan Reid had to make his way in the world while following his passion of Karate. These hardships took him many places, but also brought many failures and disappointments.
One of the failures Shihan Reid outlines in his book was always falling short of a world championship. Despite his Karate pedigree, he couldn’t quite crack the code. It wasn’t until his late thirties when he finally accomplished his goal and became the World Kumite Organization (WKO) world champion. After completing this, he took on the enormous task of successfully completing the 100-man Kumite in which he fought 100 black belts for one and half minutes, back-to-back, without a break. Completing such a task required Shihan Reid to harness his physical, mental, and emotional mettle and focus them on the fighting marathon he endured. It was an exercise in utilizing all the perseverance and indomitable spirit gained through a lifetime of training as well as continuing to develop the same to get better.
Shihan Reid, even after all the amazing accomplishments in his life, still had difficult times ahead. In his book, The Ronin Years (2021), Shihan Reid describes the difficulties he faced trying to build his Karate dojo in Australia while having a complete hip replacement, dealing with the loss of a very close friend, and raising a new family. The mindset he gained from his days as an uchi deshi, chasing a world championship, and successfully completing the 100-man fight carried him throughout the trials of life and he contributes his successes to the perseverance and indomitable spirit forged from a lifetime of hard training.
As a boy, the on screen martial artists like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jean Claude Van Damme, and Chuck Norris enamored me. On screen war heroes like Rambo and, funny enough, Chuck Norris brought an equal element of motivation to what I wanted to be when I grew up. I worked very hard to achieve my black belt in Taekwon-Do and earn an Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship during my senior year in high school. While these were achievements that would pave the way for my life’s journey, I knew there was one goal I just had to achieve; earning the coveted US Army Ranger Tab and becoming an elite soldier.
Completing the US Army Ranger School meant enduring sixty four days of pain, suffering, small-unit tactics training, airborne operations, constant leadership evaluation, little food, and even less sleep. One does not simply show up the morning of the first day and successfully complete the course. Well, not anyone I knew, at least. So, I spent the next year training my body and mind to endure the enormous and life-defining task of becoming a Ranger qualified soldier. During that year I completed the Infantry Officer Basic Course, spent countless hours training and pushing myself in relative solitude, and voraciously read anything I could get my hands on about the US Army Rangers.
Not going into the details of my training and my time during the course, which I’ll reserve for a later article, I am proud to say that I graduated and earned my Ranger Tab in May of 2004. I had done it. I beat the 80% drop-out, recycle, and failure rate and completed the course my first time through. I achieved something I only fantasized about just a few short years prior. I thought my life was set and my road would never be as hard as it was during my Ranger Tab pursuit. Well…I was wrong.
In the subsequent eighteen years after I graduated from the US Army Ranger School, my life met difficulties and hardships I never knew existed. The personal relationship failures, economic failures, career hardships, and business failures I would endure paled in comparison to the hardships I faced training for and earning my Ranger Tab. However, through all of those failures and difficulties, I found successes as well. The successes, I personally believe, were due to the mental and emotional traits of perseverance and indomitable spirit I learned as a young boy training in Taekwon-Do and earning my black belt. They were then forged in the fire of Ranger School training and I carried them with me over my twenty year career. I still carry them with me as I look to my future and know they will always be the touchstone of my endurance and resilience.
Mas Oyama was a legend because he created himself out of the hardships he endured, both voluntarily and involuntarily. He kept fighting on and developed one of the most effective and toughest Karate styles in the world as well as one of the largest martial arts organizations in the world. Shihan Judd Reid threw himself on the forging fire, taking the beatings his teachers, mentors, opponents, and life dealt him to create his legendary persona and cultivate the same in his students at his beautiful dojo. While my legend and legacy are still being built, I can attest that I have been forged and reforged into the man I am today gazing at what I will accomplish next.
The journey is greater than the destination. However, the path is rocky, undulating, and seemingly impossible at times. It takes an incredible amount of perseverance and indomitable spirit to traverse our own paths. The work we do to achieve a goal is the forge we throw ourselves on to be honed into something that will endure the next challenge. Our accomplishments are worth every bruise, every tear, and every step. It is our training ground for the next challenge, and the challenge after that. Enduring life requires perseverance and an indomitable spirit forged in the fires of life’s successes and failures.
Bibliography:
Cavca, A., Reid, J., Schriever, N. (2021). The ronin years: Mas Oyama’s young lion. Self-published by Judd Reid: Amazon.com.
Cavca, A., Reid, J., Schriever, N. (2016). The young lions: 1000 days of training under a karate legend and the 100 man kumite. Self-published by Judd Reid: Amazon.com.
Wikipedia.com. (2023). Mas Oyama. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mas_Oyama#.
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