Refinement

It has been a while since my last post, I have been pretty busy working and getting ready for the 2021 USA Fencing National Tournament. But here I am again, hoping to share some of my wisdom and experience with you guys. Today I want to talk about what Improvement and refinement really mean. This post will discuss a similar topic to my last post, but I think it's important enough that we can talk about it multiple times. After all, this is my blog, and you are my reader :).

I attached a very good-looking picture of myself (If I may say so), a rather artistic Fencing Photoshoot profile pic, done a couple years ago, by the great artist and film director Danielle Levit http://www.daniellelevitt.com/. But what I really want to talk about, is not the picture, or where it came from, but what fencing means to me.

Let me share some background information with you. This fencing season was very difficult for me for various reasons. Two of the main reasons were COVID-19 and a fencing injury I received on my hand. Now I worked really hard through the entire year in order to recover,  stay in optimal shape, and fencing ability, but my results at nationals were rather disappointing. I feel like I have improved a lot since last year but yet my results were arguably worse. So what happened? Do I give up now? Should I find another hobby?

Some people would think about those questions and decide to take a different direction in life, and sometimes that is a great choice, however for me right now that is not where I want my life to be headed. I'm lucky to have developed a dynamic mindset, one of Stoicism, which we can simply define as the endurance of hardship without the display of feelings and without complaint. In short, I think that after this season more than ever, I need to show determination and discipline and work harder than before in order to achieve my goal. The key thing here is that the bigger the obstacle we overcome, the stronger we become. I can't just give up because one fencing season did not go well, this is the perfect time to conquer any impediment in our path, any restraint that is obstructing our success.

As I have stated before, we need to work towards improvement, the refinement of ourselves, and not towards a specific result. My goal is to win the Divison 1 National Championship, but if every time I don't get first, I count this as a failure as opposed to maybe seeing my fencing growth when compared to the last year, I won't reach my goal as easily. If I continue to improve and get better, the result that I want will be within my reach. It won't be easy, but this is only the beginning of the journey.