Audit Reflection

This is the end of the spring cycle... for many of you, it is testing day.  For me, I still have farther to go with a lot of things.  This cycle was by far the most challenging of all my black belt cycles thus far for many reasons.  Now that I'm at a place much different from anything I've had at home, I had to get used to what my life now is, and I've had to deal with things that I've never come across before at home when I had a set way of doing things for years.  I started the black belt cycle strong and was very excited to take the next step in my Taekwondo journey after feeling disconnected from the community I had at home for the first time.  This community has been there for me for most of my life in a way that no person or group of people that I have met thus far could replicate, even as I had tried to while I was at Macalester.  Over the past few months since Tiger Claw, I've had to come to terms with the fact that I am pretty far removed from this community, and a lot of that time was figuring out who I was outside of it.  A lot of things popped up in an especially challenging semester that took me by surprise, even as I had been at UNCC for a few years before coming here.  The normal routine I had was hard to work through with all of that.  And part of the challenge was the persisting thought in my head that all of this was something I had to figure out by myself, just as I had done at UNCC.  And because of the unfamiliarity of all of these things happening to me here where a lot of things are new, and due to the fact that I have had to come to terms with being away from King Tiger, the semester thus far, and this first black belt cycle, have been the hardest I have dealt with.  However, the semester is not over, and neither is my journey to 4th dan.  I have a great community here, the first time I have had friends outside of King Tiger in some time, and though the dojang at Shoreview is its own thing and is unable to replicate what I had at home as I had expected, it does have a couple of awesome people to train with.  I get to come back in May after the semester is over, and I will pick up where I left off when I left for Macalester in January.  I wish to continue to journal on the site if it permits me to document things that happen until then.  For the people testing today, I wish you all good luck, and I hope you all have had a good black belt cycle, have been able to achieve your goals for yourselves over the course of the cycle, and are able to work towards the more long-term ones that will be there for after you are done with this cycle.