I Was ...

I don't know if it's just in being sick and trying to actively recover from my shoulder injury. Or just the general, snarky, smart-ass tone I feel as if I hear and read in just about every opinion on every thing I come across. Or the routine depersonalization of 21st century wage employment. Or even just the end of summer and the coming long days of autumn.

But I can feel more than a modest amount of negativity creeping in around the corners these days, and I need to remember that identifying that enemy will go a long way toward winning any fight with it if it ever does arrive in range.

Being at the Seattle Open last week - in my guise as coach rather than competitor due to my lingering cold - was exactly what the swami ordered in this regard. Outside of my family, of course, the academy is really the only other place where I feel right, where I think that what should be valued, more often than not, will be valued.

Sure, I've had my moments of frustration - as you would in any family. But there has never been a time when I didn't know that, with a little time and a little patience, everything would work itself out for the better as long as I kept at it, and remained focused on my goals and values in the context of the best the academy could provide.

There are a lot of reasons why I began training and a lot of reasons why I continue to train. But one of the most recent reasons has to do with the lifestyle, or what I've come to interpret "the lifestyle" to be as embodied by those I admire most who live it. And while some of the expressions of this lifestyle - in GracieMag, for example - lean a little toward the corny sometimes, compared to the mental sh#t that I live from time to time (with apologies to Trick Daddy) "corny" is looking better every day.

As the wise men say: I'll be who I be. But hopefully a little less. And hopefully a little more.