Our Powerful Word for July is EXCELLENCE, “consistently striving towards our personal best in order to reach our own potential.”
Good & Bad Houses, Healthy & Unhealthy Bodies
Leading up to buying my first home, I discovered that not all homes were built to the same standards of quality.
My home inspector explained to me how many of the homes in the neighborhood I was about to buy into were built “to the bare minimum” quality to pass home inspections and with the cheapest fixtures and appliances they could get away with.
They did so to build as many houses as fast as possible to sell more houses faster and move on to the next development.
Upon completing his inspection of my new home he said,”this is not a large house, but it’s a good house.”
It was well-constructed and was built to a higher standard than many of the others near it in price and location.
That house served my new, growing family for many years and was a solid, good house that became our happy home.
When I heard that contractors would build homes quickly and cut corners, it struck me as “wrong,” but understanding that they would build and be gone made sense if they just wanted the project finished and to get paid, and realizing this gave me a new perspective.
They weren’t going to live there so they naturally cared far less than the people (us) who would be spending their lives in the house.
Luckily, we found a home, and a builder, who cared about building excellent homes as much as the buyers (us), even given that this meant the homes needed to be priced somewhat higher.
If you knew, would you rather live in a shoddily-built house with crooked angles, uneven floors, and misaligned doors that was perpeptually ready to fall apart
Or, would you rather live in a sturdy, strong house where walls were aligned properly, doors closed properly, and windows sealed correctly?
Further,
Would you want to live in a body that couldn’t walk up the steps without being winded, couldn’t move a heavy piece of furniture, and was as stiff as a corpse with no appreciabls skills
Or, would you rather live in a strong, active, mobile body with a well-trained mind and a high level of skill in many areas?
This is where the mindset of arete enters the picture.
Arete, the Ancient Greek Concept of Excellence
The Greek concept of “arete,” refers to the idea of excellence, of achieving your potential, and later included the idea of high moral/character virtue.
It is the idea that if you’re going to do something, anything, you may as well do it well.
I don’t think people go into learning anything, martial arts or other, intending to be bad at it, but without a dedication to becoming excellent at it, they often fall short of being very good at all.
Learning and training with the concept of arete in mind, with the dedication that you will continue until you become capable, good, and eventually, excellent is what will ensure you do in fact become excellent and achieve arete.
Of course, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first, until you improve and earn your skills, this is where the Chinese concept of “kung fu” comes in.
Kung Fu: The Process of Achieving Skill By Consistent Effort
Kung Fu (Gong Fu), beyond its association with martial arts, refers to the skills you develop and mastery you earn by long-term effort in any endeavor.
Kung Fu refers to the daily, ongoing process of becoming excellent, of becoming a master of your craft, and of your self; the process of becoming excellence in martial arts also forges a strong, moral character when these concepts of arete and kung fu are followed.
It is the consistent effort and character-consciousness of martial arts training that merges these concepts of kung fu and arete to lead a good, meaning, and experientially rich life.