Kick the Numbers!

IT’S a hard fact of life that, in hardware stores, women are either ignored or treated as if they are ignorant.  At Home Depot, it was obvious that I was having trouble finding the chicken wire I needed.  I walked down the same aisles several times after studying the suspended signs that tell what is on each aisle.  The male employees walked all around me without even speaking to me.  A male customer entered the store, and immediately the employees offered their assistance.  I turned around to shoot a glare at one of the employees.  The customer noticed my look and said hello to me.  I said hello back.  Suddenly, we recognized each other! 

“O Lord, I am so blessed!” the man exclaimed as we made a dash toward one another with open arms.  He was my martial arts instructor; I had not seen Johnny in a # of years.  Difficult circumstances had caused me to have to hang up my black belt in karate and kickboxing.  We hugged, and then we quickly exchanged updates on our families.

Johnny encouraged me to come back to the gym so we could knock the daylights out of each other.  I wondered if I could return to that difficult, exhaustive training and boxing at my age of ## (don’t ask me what the #’s are).  I had never thought about growing up to be George Foreman (the boxer who made a comeback at age 60).    

Regardless of what age a person is, he or she is still all the same people that he or she has been, is, or will be.  In cosmic time, all time exists at the same time, and you can get good counsel from all the people you are.  The little girl inside me reminded me of how much things have changed as far as race is concerned.  When I was a teenager, I had an African-American friend at a time when Black Americans were not allowed to remain on the sidewalk if white people were on it.  I never respected the racial divide, however, so, if I saw my friend, I stepped off the sidewalk to talk to him in the street.  The other white people would stop and glare as if we were doing something wrong.  When Johnny and I shared an interracial hug at the hardware store, however, nobody paid any attention (or if someone did, we were too absorbed in each other to notice). 

The young adult inside me reminded me that I was thirty-eight years old when I, against all odds, began intensive training in martial arts.  I had had phlebitis (blood clots in my legs) and several operations, including a bone transplant to a fractured neck.  During my karate training, I had a couple more operations, but I kept coming back to martial arts.  When I finally got my black belt at age forty-five, one of the men in the class told me, “The first day that you came here, several of us men took bets on how long you would last.  You caused all of us to lose our bets.”

I decided to talk it over with my future me.  Some of the best human counsel a person can get is with one’s future self.  If you have a problem or need to make a decision, try to imagine yourself twenty or thirty or more years from now.  If yourself from the future could visit yourself in the present, what would he or she advise?  Maybe he or she would tell you to not light that first cigarette or to eat a healthier diet.  Maybe he or she would tell you to watch less television and read more.  Maybe he or she would tell you to spend more time in prayer and in studying the Qur’an to learn how you can apply it to your daily life.  Maybe he or she will simply tell you to relax more, stop working so hard, eat more ice cream, and spend more time in the sunshine. 

I asked the granny inside me what she thought about my going back to karate and kickboxing.  She said, “Girl, get out there and kick some ##’s!” 

Maybe you have some ##’s to kick –too many calories and too many pounds, too many hours spent in needless worry, too many hours working too hard or too many hours wasted by not working hard enough, or too many other problems.  You know yourself better than any other person does, so let the younger person inside you remind you of past mistakes and successes from which you can learn, and ask the older adult inside you for advice and direction.