I am engaged

         Staying engaged can be a struggle.  Like training, there will be times where things are going great, you're making improvements, and life seems easy; and there will be times that you feel like you're beating your head against a wall.  Same goes for engagement.  At times I feel really engaged with my training, my instructors, teammates, friends, partner, and my work; and then there are times where I feel I've kind of dropped off the map and am lost in my own world. 

         I'm at the point where I am just trying to keep myself engaged.  It is not perfect by any means, but I'm trying nonetheless.  My training the last few weeks has gone down, not stopped, just less frequent as of late.  I'm trying to keep up with it, booking my one-on-ones to keep the momentum going in the areas I know I need improvement, I show up for every class, participate in demos, and extra training like preparing for the team form for the Tiger Challenge, and partaking in the Dragon dance.  I do these things to force myself to stay engaged in what I'm doing, and to stay engaged with my teammates and instructors.  On the home and work front, I do my best to stay engaged by keeping communication open and letting others know how I'm doing emotionally and physically, and also by seeing how they are doing too.

        Blogging by far has been my best tool.  Even if I fall behind on my numbers for push-ups, sit-ups, form and weapon reps, I still make sure to blog once or twice a week.  Again, I'm not putting out mind blowing, prolific stuff all the time, in fact some of my blogs haven't been great at all; but I'm still making that effort to contribute to chronicling my journey.  I'd like to say that I've achieved some form of effortless effort with my blogging.  Not that I'm not putting thought into what I'm writing, just sometimes I have my thoughts well organized, where as other times I feel like I'm rambling more than anything, trying to fit pieces from different puzzles together.  Blogging keeps me engaged with where I am at, even through the times where I think everything sucks.  My hope is that I can look back later, when I have more mental clarity, and realize that things weren't actually that bad, and that it was all apart of the process of mastery.

        So am I engaged?  Yes, and no.  Again, I'm not perfect, I'm just trying my best to be the best version of myself.