Seeing The Dream
Seeing the Future, Chasing the Future, Making it Today
One of my martial arts students, John, gave me this wonderful T-shirt yesterday.
What a great metaphor for the BJJ journey.
There’s a definite argument to be made for non-belt systems in martial arts (and they exist, Sambo, for example, and there are others), but one manner in which it definitely helps is that with that system, a student can visualize the journey before them… and seeing it makes it somehow more believable.
A white belt often cannot think of a day when they are worthy of wearing a black belt. It seems too far away, too difficult, too much to accomplish. It’s foreboding.
Considering it can take eight to ten years to earn a black belt in BJJ (and oftentimes, it can take longer; it took me nearly fourteen), it’s hard to see that far ahead and justify the work. One can, but it’s very challenging.
But one can visualize being a blue belt (the next rank in BJJ). It seems very possible.
Then, one can see the next step from blue is purple and work accordingly. And you can tell yourself, I’m chasing my dream. I’m chasing my future. But the longer the journey, the more important it is to visualize the end result. Otherwise, one can get lost. See the steps, and take the steps.
This doesn’t only work in martial arts* but in many other arenas.
I have a great writer bud, Dave, who writes novels. One of his tricks is to type out the title page of the book he’s going to write. Then he gets a sheaf of paper, at least three hundred blank pages, and lays it on his desk. He puts the title page on the stack of black paper. And imagines that’s what his book will look like when it’s finished.
He’s creating a dream image that he’ll spend the next year or longer chasing.
Until he catches it and makes it his today.
I do something similar but with covers. I’ll sometimes create a book cover before I write it. The cover helps me visualize the finished product. See the dream. Plus, considering that I have to hire someone to create that cover means I spent money, and if I don’t finish the novel, that money is wasted.
I generally use word count for fiction to mark my journey.
It’s hard to imagine writing a novel that’s 100,000 words long. Really hard. My goal is 1000 words a day. That’s not difficult at all. Help, I probably write more than 1k words via emails and texts alone every day. It’s very doable.
And if I write 1k words of fiction every day for a hundred days (little more than three months), I’ll have a 100,000-word book by the end. And I use the cover, finally.
Humans differ from animals in that we can see a far future and that we can see things that don’t yet exist. We can see life when we’re old, we can see a time when we can create a house from wood, a car from metal that we melted from ore, we create things that don’t exist. Movies are dreams made real, in fact.
That is our superpower. BJJ didn’t exist hundreds of years ago. It was created from something else, someone had a dream, a vision, and chased it until they caught it.
It was always my dream to be a good father, to live the life of a martial artist, and to make movies and write novels, as best I could.
And that’s what’s interesting about the T-shirt. The Pac-Man doesn’t stop once it eats all the belts. It keeps going. My buddy Dave (and I) didn’t stop writing novels after we finished our first ones. We kept going. Inventors don’t stop inventing once they hit a big one, nor do actors stop acting once they win all the awards.
So the belts, like awards and applause, are markers of the journey, nothing more, nothing less. Getting a graduate degree, winning a trophy, traveling to the other side of the world - all markers of specific experiences of one’s individual journey.
But the journey one embarks on in pursuit of a dream, that’s what matters.
You must find a way to see that dream first to realize it and continue living it even after you have captured the future and made it there today; that’s what truly counts.
What’s the dream you see before you?
*I know, I know, I need to write more about martial arts in this space. I will, I promise. The writing life has consumed much of my time on my substack, but that day shall come.