I took up karate in my late 40s
The other night I fought four teenagers. One threw a punch, another grabbed my shoulders, a third put hands around my throat and the last one came at me with a club. With Miyagi-esque reflexes I met each aggression with memorized defense techniques punctuated with a confident: HI-yah!
That’s how the test of my white belt karate skills was supposed to go.
Some of the more advanced students, the ones choking me and so forth, have parents who are younger than me. In real life, during this afore-described sequence, I flubbed most of the choreographed attack responses, and I apologized out loud (I’m sorry … omygosh, sorry, oops, sorry) to each of the kids as I halfheartedly kicked and chopped at them.
Also, my HI-yah was barely audible (definitely not followed by an exclamation mark).
With humiliating formality, the sensei presented a sunshine-yellow belt to me at the end of the hour.I felt patronized and ridiculous, but I also had a smile plastered on my face in the aftermath. And there was this foreign feeling—I think it was compassion, for myself—bubbling beneath the chagrined surface.
Also, remarkably, my constant dark companion, a low-grade melancholy and panic, had, albeit temporarily, taken a hike.
What’s good for being sad
In T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Arthur asks his teacher Merlin what’s good for being sad.
The best thing for being sad, replied the wizard, is to learn something.
My heart broke when my mom died. I missed her, and I took on my dad and my children’s grief. Also, her death made manifest with shocking clarity the previously notional fact that everyone I love will die.
The woman who loved me and hurt me as only a mother can no longer existed in this world. That shook my foundation, untethered and frightened me.
I carry the certitude of death around now and have no desire to shed it, lest it catch me off guard.
I just have to be careful that the sadness that seeps into every experience now doesn’t discourage love or joy.
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