Bottoms Up

There was a stabbing in Plummer Idaho that resulted in someone's death. The strange thing is that Plummer is not that big, I went to grade school in Plummer for a time and quite possibly knew the people.
The lady that called the police turns out to be the mother of my Aikido Teacher and friend, she, in turn, had been his Aikido Teacher. Small world, you might think, yes, and it is getting smaller by the minute.

Smaller is not a bad thing, less is often more, especially when coming face to face with those dark mirky places in the pit of humanity.
You cannot take time to train for decades before you are able to apply what you know, what you know needs to be applicable right away, not within weeks, not within months, not within years.
You shouldn't have to be an athlete in order to provide protection for yourself or your family, and often the people who are going to test your metal are not athletes themselves, so obviously they know something and what they know works for them.

Awareness is not even half the battle, it is no guarantee you will be left alone, allowed to live to a ripe old age and die in your sleep.
That prospect is becoming less of a possibility on so many different levels, whether it be environmental pollution, bad health, economic collapse - often all of the above intertwined.
We are not promised the time we are given and no one really knows just how much time they have left, especially now. That is the point.

Level the playing field - that does not mean make things even, no, take a que from those in the know, keep it one-sided, fairness has no place in the equation.
If you are breathing long enough to spend years training, you have had it easy to this point, from this point on that is something to be celebrated, not something to take for granted.
The old is clashing with the new; in the old days if you were alive long enough to gain any sort of deeper understanding in your training that was a testament to the training itself, from day one, not from day two thousand fifty.

I end up doing a lot of walking, at present I have to walk through a rough part of town just to get home.
My brother was clubbed six times in the head with a retractable baton in a random event on the side of the street just down from a Cop Shop. Things may not be as hunky-dory as they seem, or as we are told.
Time to start thinking about why we are doing what we are doing and how we go about doing it in relation to what is, rather than what we think or how we think things should be.