From my heart

I practice Sonhahm Taekwondo. One of the goals of the ATA is to instill certain life skills in the students, and in so doing build their character. At the beginning of each class or event we recite a declaration or oath. To me, the declarations we make, is also about how we should conduct ourselves as people in everyday life. I have spent a long time in the Defense Force and as a young officer we were taught the skills of Courtesy, Loyalty and Respect. I just wish that we can teach these same skills to the public at large. I am seeing and experiencing the lack of courtesy, loyalty, respect, integrity and self-control that the people have around me. People of a non-profit group being outright rude, children being rude to their parents, senior (in rank but junior in age) people being rude to juniors (in rank but senior in age). What happened to common decency, courtesy, and respect? We do not have self-control, and we do not teach our children self-control and even th...

I came across this post from Bryan Ward this morning: Every day you are beaten :  Beaten by the leaky sink you keep avoiding. Beaten by the applesauce on the wall you keep not scrubbing off. Beaten by the dent in the drywall you keep putting off fixing. You long to conquer mountains, yet every day you are beaten by molehills. All these little problems… they should be so easily solved. Yet they go on defeating you, day after day, until at last you conclude that you are not a capable man: If you are this easily defeated, “surely” you do not have what it takes to win the bigger fights: to become your fittest self, to create a business empire, to create works of art that will outlast you. Hell, you can’t even fix a leaky sink: might as well f*** off and go watch TV. But you’ve misdiagnosed the problem entirely. … One summer day when I went into the workshop, I saw that the plastic gas cans by the tractor were bulging like balloons. I had left the vents closed, and the hea...