Reflections on identity, discipline, and the quiet path between mastery and belonging
I didn’t write this as a lesson.
It’s just something that’s been sitting with me for a long time. The feeling of being in-between. Of learning across decades, across systems, across cultures.
And never quite arriving.
This isn’t about failure. And it’s not about mastery either.
It’s about wandering. Returning. Beginning again.
And the strange kind of life that can take shape in the middle of all that.
There's a moment, usually around 2 AM when sleep won't come, when the math doesn't add up. Decades of training, and I should be sharper than this. Faster than this. Better than this.
The creeping doubt settles in like fog, all those years, all those different dojos, and somehow I'm still just... okay. There's got to be a reason why.
The Weight of Choosing Everything
I've got friends who never left their system. Same uniform, faded now from decades of washing. Same kind of mats, same feel underfoot, though not the same physical ones, echoing years of repetition in familiar patterns. Same system, the same forms, the same techniques, refined year after year until they're worn smooth as river stones.
Their stances have roots that go down to bedrock. When they move, it's not movement, it's geology in motion. Thirty or forty years of the same blocks, the same strikes, the same philosophical framework carved so deep into muscle memory that it lives in their dreams.
Me?
I'm the collector of fragments.
Growing up in Japan, martial arts wasn't exotic. It was just part of life. Kids heading to kendo practice, judo gis slung over shoulders like gym bags. Karate and Judo tournaments on TV. The sound of wooden swords cutting air from the school gym down the street. It was as ordinary as rice for dinner, as natural as bowing when you met someone new.
But when life moved me to a tiny ski town in Europe before I turned ten years old, suddenly martial arts became scarce as Japanese food. Which is to say, non-existent.
Once I was about twelve, I uncovered a couple of different classes. Boxing and Tae Kwon Do, that was the menu. So I ended up taking both.
Even then, I couldn't choose just one flavor.
I haunted bookstores, devouring anything with a martial arts spine. Not the popular English titles everyone talks about. They didn't exist where I was... those lived in cities hours away, places I could only visit on a rare occasion.
Karate books were rare, let alone books on other martial arts. And those I did find were usually written by foreigners... people who, to me, were writing from the outside about a culture and context I'd been raised in. My culture.
It sometimes felt like flipping through an episode of The Twilight Zone. Familiar words, but just slightly off. Slightly wrong. Still, I devoured every one I could find. And somehow, it always made me hungry for more.
The Candy Store Years
California in my late teens and my early twenties was like stepping into Willy Wonka's factory, if Wonka had been obsessed with weapons and knocking people unconscious.
I had my black belt in Kyokushin karate by then. Japanese Jujutsu too. Real credentials. At least, that’s what they were supposed to mean.
But the variety was intoxicating.
Jeet Kune Do classes run by guys who actually trained with Bruce Lee. Filipino martial arts that treated knives like extensions of your fingers.
Immigrants from Korea and Japan quietly teaching Hapkido and Aikido out of strip malls and rec centers, their movements soft-spoken but undeniably precise.
Russian Systema that looked like drunk dancing until someone was on the ground, confused about how they got there.
Brazilian jiu-jitsu still in its American infancy, back when most people had barely heard of it. The classes I found were sparse and scrappy, taught by early adopters who had often started with VHS tapes and occasional seminars. But they were brown and black belts—when those were rare. Back then, even a blue belt could walk into a room and blow our minds.
So I sampled. Like a tourist in my own discipline.
A couple of years here, six months there. Long enough to get the flavor, never long enough to develop the deeper palate. Long enough to learn the basic vocabulary, never long enough to become fluent.
I told myself it was curiosity.
Research.
A scholarly approach to understanding the complete spectrum of human combat. Even Bruce Lee said, "Research your own experience; absorb what is useful, reject what is useless and add what is essentially your own."
Really, I think it was fear...
Fear of missing out? Fear of being boxed in?
Probably. These days, I’m less sure it mattered.
The Specialist's Envy
There's something I recognize now in the eyes of my friends who stayed put. A kind of quiet ownership. They don't just practice their art, they belong to it, and it to them. They're not just students or even teachers. They're custodians of something larger than themselves.
When they demonstrate a technique, it's not showing off. It's revealing. Like a geologist cracking open a rock to show you the crystals that only form under specific conditions, over impossible spans of time.
Their bodies speak a language I only half-learned.
Thirty years, maybe more, of the same basic blocks, but each one different now. Informed by decades of micro-adjustments, tiny discoveries, the slow accumulation of understanding that only comes from staying in one place long enough for the place to change you.
I watch them and feel the particular ache of the wanderer: always learning, never arriving.
Lost in Translation
Moving between systems is like being a permanent tourist. You learn enough to get by, to ask for directions and order food. But you never dream in the language.
I can throw a decent jab from my boxing days. My hands from Kenpo, all edge and economy, shaped by the amazing logic of the art. My kicks carry the memory of Kyokushin Karate. My ground game borrows from Brazilian jiu jitsu, my throws from Judo, my knife awareness from Filipino arts.
But none of it goes bone-deep.
I missed the 10,000th repetition of the same kata, the one where it finally stops being a series of moves and becomes a conversation with something ancient.
I missed the breakthrough that comes somewhere around year seven in the same system, when you stop memorizing techniques and start learning principles... properly.
I missed that sense of being claimed by something.
The way my specialist friends carry their art like a native language - not just learned, but lived in. Where the art becomes inseparable from who they are, worn as naturally as their own skin.
Me? I'm conversational in many languages but never quite fluent enough to dream in any of them. Even after decades in Kenpo, even after all those years in JKD - I can speak them, but I don't feel at home in them. Not the way they do.
The Terrible Freedom of Choice
Here's what nobody tells you about being a generalist: choice becomes paralysis.
In a real moment of stress, the specialist reacts. The generalist hesitates. And hesitation, even for a blink, can be everything.
I've got a dozen answers to the same problem, and honestly, I don't care about most of them anymore. Not in the way I used to. These days, I’m more interested in who I become in the pause. Not which technique I choose.
But there's something else nobody talks about, the loneliness of never quite belonging anywhere.
It's a familiar feeling, one I learned early. Growing up between cultures, you develop a particular kind of homesickness for places that were never quite home to begin with.
It’s a kind of exile, not dramatic or tragic, but quiet and persistent. Like always translating in your head, even when you're fluent. A martial artist without a homeland. Culturally adrift. Dojo to dojo, art to art, always learning the customs but never inheriting the roots. Always passing through.
The Accumulation of Almosts
Sure, I've got several black belts. Instructor certifications. But they feel light somehow, like certificates from schools I attended but never graduated from in my heart. I used to display them on the wall in my office. Now they reside in a box in my attic. The kind of credentials that look impressive on paper but sit hollow in your chest.
There's a quiet longing I can't quite name. Not for recognition or lineage or students who revere me. Something else. Maybe it's the longing to feel complete in one thing. To have that bone-deep certainty that comes from walking one path so long you've worn it smooth.
Instead, I'm a walking encyclopedia of first chapters.
A collection of beginnings that never quite became middles, let alone ends. And maybe they never will. I'm not sure that bothers me anymore.
What Survives the Wandering
But here's the thing about being broken in a lot of different ways, you develop a strange resilience.
When one approach doesn't work, I've got others. When one philosophy fails me, I can borrow from different wells. I've learned to adapt not just techniques, but entire worldviews.
The gentle flow from aikido when force isn't the answer. The direct brutality of Kyokushin when it is. The chess-like patience of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The explosive economy of Filipino blade work.
I never mastered any one mountain, but I learned to read the terrain.
And maybe, maybe, there's something to be said for that kind of literacy. For being conversational in the universal language of how bodies move, how they break, how they heal.
The Art of Returning
The one thing I did master, accidentally, was the ability to come back.
To swallow pride and bow in as a beginner again. To start over. To admit I didn't know everything about anything, and be okay with that.
To fall in love with the process more than the destination.
Honestly, I think I liked becoming a beginner again. It was freeing. No expectations. No need to prove anything. Maybe I was chickening out... avoiding the pressure of going deeper. Maybe I just liked the clean slate.
Most people quit something once and stay quit. I learned to quit and return, quit and return, like breathing. Like seasons.
Each time I came back, I was different. Softer in some places, harder in others. Carrying questions I didn't have before, looking for answers in techniques I'd dismissed.
The Strange Arithmetic of Almost
I'll never be the guy they call when they need to demonstrate the perfect technique. Never be the one whose name gets attached to a system or a school or a legacy.
But I'm still here.
And if I'm being completely honest - and isn't that the point of these late-night reckonings - there are threads that run deeper than the wandering suggests.
Thirty-five years of Kenpo, on and off. Nearly thirty in the JKD world and its cousins. Not the unbroken lineage my specialist friends can claim, but not the pure wandering either. More like... orbiting. Circling back. Finding home in ideas rather than institutions.
Maybe that's its own kind of path - the spiral instead of the straight line.
Still training. Still learning. Still in love with the mystery of how humans have found ten thousand ways to dance with violence and call it art.
Maybe the wandering was the point. Maybe some of us are meant to be bridges between islands, translators between languages, collectors of the spaces between things.
Maybe being a master of none is its own kind of mastery, messy and unsatisfying and real.
Or maybe I'm just telling myself stories to make peace with all the things I almost became.
Maybe being a master of none isn’t a flaw to be fixed, but a shape to be accepted. An unfinished story, still being written. A mosaic made of nearlys. A quiet path that doesn’t lead anywhere grand, but still deserves to be walked.