Grandmaster Tae Yun Kim: the more serious side of life

Pinch yourself. Feel the pinch. Feel your body. Some day, this body will be gone. Some day, you will no longer be practicing your forms on the Do Jang floor. You will no longer execute this beautiful jump spinning roundhouse kick, or do your favorite break.

We do not know the time, but no matter who you are, and what you are doing with your life, we all, some day, will have to continue our journey without this body. So it is important to do, whatever it is that you want to accomplish in your life – right here, right now. “Carpe Diem”, the Romans used to say, “Carpe Diem, sed fugit interea irreparabile tempus”. Seize the day! Because time, that you can’t bring back, is fleeing!”

But in our here and now, especially in the Western World, many of us are seduced into a sense of “foreverness” about our lives, thinking that we have unlimited time to get somewhere or do something. Not that we say that consciously to ourselves. We don’t say, “I’m going to be alive forever;” we just act that way. We simply do not have the feeling from day to day that eventually we are going to die, or that our time here is limited.

Since we don’t live from moment to moment with the awareness that we could die at anytime, we take our time answering the questions mentioned above, or we avoid them altogether. Even if we ask a question like “Am I where I want to be?” it’s all too easy to reply “Well, I’ll get there someday,” and drop the matter right there. We tend to put off the fulfillment of our real goals to “when I retire,” or “when the kids are out of the house,” or “when I have time.”

“Someday” is never going to come. The only time there is, is now. When “someday” comes, it will be now. So what you think and do right now is what will happen on the mythical “someday”.