One Purple Belt’s Perspective, Five Years Later
My annual jiu-jitsu anniversary post about what I’ve learned and lost in another year of physical, emotional, and spiritual commitment to a very strange sport.
Before I start this year’s edition of the post, I should note that I struggled with the title. While I am now a purple belt (to my own disbelief) and usually title these posts by convention of “One [Color of Belt] Belt’s perspective…” I was tempted to title this one as “One White Belt’s Perspective, Five Years Later.”
Why?
In part because of my trying to maintain a curious, fearless-of-failure, beginner’s mindset — a very good reason to write the post as a “White Belt’s Perspective.” But it is mostly because my time at purple belt has been spent feeling more like a white belt than I ever did as a white belt.
You don’t know what you don’t know — and in the last year, I really learned just how much I didn’t know.
Last year, my post “One Blue Belt’s Perspective, Four Years Later” was the one in which I announced that I was spending the foreseeable future away from my home gym to travel, train full-time, and write a book about my experience on the road across America and the road “to greatness” as a “fighter” and writer…whatever that meant to me then.
