Taekwondo

Taekwondo is one of the most important and fulfilling things in my life right now, but that wasn't exactly the case during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Taekwondo has shaped most of my values in life, and has always been my go to activity in my life. In February and early March of 2020, everything was going well. We had our organization's annual gathering in Burlington VT, which barely missed the Covid wave that struck just after. That was when my training took a little bit of a stumble. We started to do Zoom classes twice a week, but it just wasn't quite the same. Our basement doesn't have the space to do forms without hitting a wall, and there can be no interactive drills on Zoom. During that time, my fitness level went down, and my overall aptitude for Taekwondo dropped. I never planned on quitting, but it just kept getting worse and worse. We did do some outside classes when summer came, but it didn't feel the same as the year prior. But when the gym opened back up for in person classes in fall 2021, I was ecstatic. I could finally get back into training, and that's exactly what I did. I felt myself getting stronger and I started gaining new skills that I didn't have before the pandemic. If anything, that dip in my training, the same dip many other people had (or have) during the pandemic, just made me more confident in my ability to do Taekwondo. It made me realize that while mastering, or trying to master Taekwondo (one can never truly master something), my progress will never go up in one straight line. The line will always level out, dip, plummet, or sky rocket. But it will never be consistent. That is the true knowledge needed to ¨master¨ something.