Instructor Torez brought with him more than a stack of lessons blessed with solid side kicks and a desire to reach beyond your minds eye to stop in the center of 40 to 50 full sit-ups within 60 seconds—clutched to his thought process was another traveler’s journey...a quote that he had been searching years for: Don’t follow a man for his age but look to him for his strength in locating that place that took him where he traveled.
In the 90’s they called it The Zone. Nike once spent millions on Tiger Woods to convince you to Just Do It. The people at Apple already know of your addiction to speed, capability and desire to be different so they use the Less Is More philosophy by creating machines that make you feel incredibly guilty when you don’t have one but your neighbor does.
Openly and honestly, that’s pretty much how I got to being a black belt in martial arts.
The system is for big and little kids with an end result based on the color of the belt wrapped around your waist at the start of every class. Somewhere along the journey though…it no longer mattered—I was getting a bigger high off an incredible surge of electricity brought on by methods of meditation nobody until martial arts invited me to.
Runners and fast walkers get locked into a zone. Hard working coworkers heighten their skills when fixed to the beginning, middle and end of every project. Being a black belt didn’t guarantee me the rush until one day while doing horrible amounts of push ups my way of processing information suddenly went away and what I saw, felt and needed to get back to was a zone.
It’s become my passion to reach it every day, several times a day. Through careful study of how the mind, body and soul works…the unexpected, carefully planned out, uninvited, the ups and downs, the shattered and torn, the reminded and performed over and over again feat become fuel. The biggest test was on July 21, 2009 when the ER doctor said, “You’re having a heart attack.”
I had been to this pressure point before. The fear of succeeding in radio. The fear of being accepted by my parents. The fear of failure. The fear of being a writer and artist in a world supersized with too many opinions. Because I practiced daily to mentally retreat my last heart checkup earned an awkward remark from the highly trained and too darn expensive doctor, “You were given a mulligan. You didn’t listen to us when we said no push ups. You didn’t listen to us when we said no martial arts. You went back to work less than a week after heart surgery…and what I expected to find in your tests doesn’t exist. We don’t even see scar tissue.”
The Zone…
Bill Gates is a billionaire because of our failure to pay attention to the selves we constantly throw under the bus. Television shows waste no time pointing fingers and laughing at our overweight nation…we have too much to do, too much to say, want too much for what little we do and for what reason other than to fill up a box.
Personally, I’d love to know where Michael Jordon went while crafting his tools to be basketballs greatest. If he’s like most, when questioned he’ll giggle like a two year old kid and attempt to think of a fast answer by way of trying to push my inquiring mind away.
I want to know where Tiger Wood’s mind is right now. The Master’s has arrived and maybe 1/100th of this nation will admit they still love the man who could’ve been king.
I’d like to know where George Clooney slips off to when becoming the next attraction on a bigger than life sheet of blizzard white.
Two weeks ago baseball legend Daryl Strawberry couldn’t find his zone on Donald Trumps Celebrity Apprentice. The faster than life player walked off the set claiming he was too tired to continue.
Where is that line in the sand? That beast of a machine unpainted destination that shouts only to those who confess, “I can’t.” And yet we never see that point of no return as being a rest stop toward reaching a higher zone. We’re trained to look away from those who stop. We’re asked to leave behind the sick and take good care of the assumed strong.
When I get to that giant gate in the sky I want to spend 15 minutes with Mother Theresa, to stare into the eyes that agreed to set aside the horrid darkness this planet can sometimes create and see a brilliant light called hope.
I would love to write poetry with Billy Graham—to hear his aging voice speak one on one and not to a billion plus sixteen viewers vowing to dedicate their paths to places other than themselves.
Don’t follow a man for his age but look to him for his strength in locating that place that took him where he traveled.
I want to get to know my mother again. To see where a single mother of four felt the strength to put one foot in front of the other every hour, of every second…her eldest being weakened by what society has labeled other than perfect and yet she kept him out of institutions and hospitals knowing his life would be filled with tremendous love every second he spent with the creation of her family.
Maybe it’s time we truly get to know who it is we call our family and friends. The end result is a better knowledge of the zones they keep. If a child of four or five were to look at me and ask, “What is it like to be almost fifty?” I’d have no words for him or her to keep.
Maybe it’s time we start showing people the way.
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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