Andrew Meier's Blog

Last week, I was affected by a random act of kindness. Though I've always known this, I was just reminded of it last Wednesday. An act of kindess can totally make someone's day, or even week. In this week's blog, I'd like to share this random act of kindness that totally made my day. Since we live relatively close to Kung Fu, my sister and I usually walk there every class. So, as we were walking through our neighbourhood, a complete stranger walked up to us and asks if we did Kung Fu, as he'd seen my sister's training sword. After a small conversation, he called his wife to run inside. She came out with another sword! A little surprised when he insisted we take it, we wished them well and continued walking. Not only was this act of kindess unexpected, it was surprisingly heartfelt. This was a bit of a reminder to try and not only keep up my acts of kindness, but also make them more thoughtful. I'm sure that more thoughtful acts of kindness will make

I don't have much to talk about this week so I decided to simply post an update on some of my personal goals. First, one of my goals was to get all -1 classes for my grade 10 schooling year. Around a month ago, I recieved my teacher's reccomendations for what classes to take next year. They were all for the highest courses. As long as nothing bad happens with my studies, that goal should be no problem. Also, one of my goals is to run a 10 kilometer run in under 43 minutes. I do most of my training with my school long distance running program, and we've started training for the 10km Banff marathon race. I don't expect to be able to achieve my goal by the time of the race (June 17) but over the summer I'll train to be able to run that time.

The other day, I heard something that made a lot of sense, even though I'd never really thought about it before. It was that the only time you have to train is when you don't want to. If you want to train, it's pretty much optional, but to really get the most out of your training, you have to do it especially when you don't want to. This is what discipline really is. Sifu Brinker's words really stuck with me because of just how much sense it makes. In doing what you dislike, it really builds character and discipline. Overall, I think this is the most important mindset when trying to work towards anyting. I'll always try to apply this mindset to all aspects of my life, if it relates to Kung Fu or not.

Today, I picked up one of my Rubik's cubes. It was really the first time in a couple months that'd done so, and I felt confident I would have the same abilities I'd had last autumn. This was not the case. My average then was about 25 seconds per solve. Now, I'm having trouble breaking 30. Some of my more used turning patterns came back easily, but others, the ones I'd been new with when I'd taken my break, were gone completely from my memory. A couple minutes with my notes brought them back, but they were still foggy and required lots of thought. My muscle memory had essentially faded. This really showed me a lot of things involving practice and consistency. If you don't practice something, you will definetly not improve and may even lose that skill completely. Solving these puzzles is a hobby I'm looking forwards to picking back up, but that won't be possible without practice.