It was the final culmination of weeks of preparation; meeting with seniors in the dojo to get feedback, training with as many students in class as possible to get the best rotations, going over all my notes from the past few years.
My teacher put me on notice.
From this moment forward, at some point I was going to be examined.
He knew the date and time, and I was just going to have to find out by being ready.
While I was preparing and practicing, I tried to keep open for any clues during class.
Any after-class meeting with any of the senior students?
Anything change in the dojo?
A shift in the calligraphy?
Four weeks to the day, I was told tonight was the night.
Class had the appearance of being normal, but I knew I was being watched. Normally the senior students mix in with the rest of the class; they take different points in the room, but tonight they mostly gravitated towards the teacher.
I tried to focus as best as I could on class.
The test was going to be after class—no black belt class for the night. I would be the black belt class, along with a few junior students who would be brought in to assist the test.
The first part was as expected: demonstrate the various movements required and be able to perform them at the appropriate level. This was easy enough. Easy as in, if one practiced enough and kept to the training, it was just a matter of endurance in learning them.
The next part was a little more intense, as I was paired up with some of the junior students to demonstrate the various required techniques.
At first I was surprised my friend wasn’t there, trying to figure out why the teacher had not brought him in for the examination. I was the one who brought him into the dojo, and we had been training together for the past six years.
He wasn’t that much far behind me, and he should have been there.
Some of the junior students made the examination easy for me, by either being afraid, as if they were under the examination of the teacher and senior students, or by taking a fall early to make me look good.
Most wanted me to succeed, and the teacher had to account for this, but there were also a few who would have liked to see me fail.
They changed the attack at the last minute, deviated from the form—anything subtle to hinder my test.
They were stealing the moment, and I very much wanted to hit them harder.
It was demonstrating techniques on the senior students that was the most difficult. Not because they knew what I was going to do, which they did, but rather because of the nothingness they presented to me.
They neither helped nor hindered me.
There was nowhere to hide my movement, or lack of it.
Two hours later, I was asked to step outside and wait in the hallway until I was called to come back in to the dojo floor.
It was quiet in the hallway, and dark, since the main part of the dojo had been shut down for the night. I paced back and forth for a bit before sitting down in seiza and trying to meditate.
Thoughts normally come and go, as in not trying to stop them or prevent them, but rather, on the way to stillness, just letting them play out until the mind no longer cares about the thought.
But not this time.
Maybe it was all the adrenaline?
Maybe it was my nerves?
The best I could do was put my attention to my breathing and put the focus of my mind on the background noise of the passing cars from the parkway behind the dojo.
I think I must have fallen asleep, as I didn’t hear the senior student call my name. It took a light tap on the shoulder to get me up as I entered back in the main hall.
There, in the center of the room, was the teacher, fukuro shinai in hand.
The last part of the examination was about to begin.
When I received my green belt some years ago, I couldn’t wait for the next class—to walk out on the dojo floor as a kohai, a junior student.
I was finally officially a part of the dojo, despite attending classes for almost a year.
Bowing and crossing the dojo floor was the greatest feeling in the world.
I never considered what this would feel like, mainly because I never considered that the day would come.
Yet, here I was.
The only thing to do was walk out and be in the moment of crossing the dojo floor.
There was a round of applause, and a round of hugs and well wishes, as the results of the examination were kept secret from the rest of the class until tonight.
My friend was the last to congratulate me.
When we all lined up before the kamiza, the new division was apparent and on display.
Before, I sat with my friend on the second row, and now he was alone as I sat in the front row.
“I want to take you out to dinner.”
It had been a few weeks, and my friend waited until the hype in the dojo died down and he could take me out to officially say congratulations.
He picked the place, and we had a great dinner and almost too many drinks.
Talking about the training, laughing at some of the characters—he always was the bad boy of the dojo. He even managed to talk two of the waitresses into dancing with us, celebrating my special night.
Making sure we got to our cars, and saying goodnight to each other, it was there, as he was driving off, that I realized that he had already made a decision.
No comments:
Post a Comment