@luizH lol at zumba!!
I hope that you make it to karate kicking grandma. Just FYI - my mom is 75 and she stopped tae kwon do lessons 2 years ago because her knees hurt - but was kicking up until then!

Milestone. I got my black belt and was fully intending to continue until the day I died. Marriage derailed that train but now I'm back on track

Milestone. Once I hit black belt that's when I get access to the special training classes and fight in the more serious divisions.

Oh, I forgot about this! @bwmalone - "that's the best I can hope for" is brilliant wording. That is exactly how I used to feel about 1st kup, never mind 1st dan! It wasn't that I considered training to beyond 1st dan pointless (as some people do), it was that it seemed literally unachievable.

Sorry, this is all very tl;dr but I've thought about what a black belt means to me for a long time.

What black belt means seems to be different from martial art to martial art, and my thoughts reflect the TKD as it is taught where I live. With that proviso neatly out of the way, I shall now proceed to bore you all to death. You're welcome!

My attitude towards what a black belt represents has changed a lot over the years. I now see it as a milestone, but not necessarily in the same way as anyone else.

Like everyone else does I guess, I started martial arts with the perception that having a black belt made you invincible and you had to be Bruce Lee standard to get one. I never really got rid of that conviction as a teen, how ever many times I was told it was a milestone. I knew better, right? Every time I passed any belt test, I always felt like a fraud, to be honest, and I could not understand what my instructor saw in me.

Over half a decade later after the last time I'd trained, I had a bit of an epiphany. I was tutoring a young man in a language that I'd studied at high school/university, because he'd lately moved from an area where no schools offered it, to my part of the woods where some do. He'd always wanted to study it at university one day, so he'd been teaching it to himself at his old school. This is where I came in. I was his first live human being he'd had a chance to get feedback from, and he asked me what level of language course he should be enrolling on in the new term. He had the choice of starting on beginners, higher beginners or lower intermediate. This lad was a-may- zing: he had a natural ear for languages, and passion enough to get to a reasonable standard solely on his own, so I said lower intermediate, progressing to upper intermediate the year after. He'd expected to apply for higher beginners, so he was horrified.

Now, he thought he should do the beginners because he only had a full grasp of 70% of higher beginners material, and he felt he needed 100% on that to be ready to progress to the higher class. I completely agreed that he only had a full grasp of 70% of the material, and said that was precisely why he should do lower intermediate.

My 'professional' opinion was that if he did the higher beginners course, he would be surrounded by students at a far lower standard than him. Conversation with them wasn't going to push him, and the work was going to be pitched at bringing unenthused teens up from the beginners' standard up to the level he had already reached. I thought it unlikely he would fill in that 30% gap over the nine months of the course. On the other hand, I thought that within six months in upper intermediate, with engaged teens at his level and beyond, he would fill in that gap and more. To be frank, the idea of seeing this brilliantly gifted linguist held back from his dreams in an inappropriate class was physically painful.

And that's when my epiphany about belt-tests came, and I 'got' everything anyone had ever said to me about reaching black belt. Suddenly I was on the other side of the grading table, if you see what I mean. As I explained my reasoning to that wonderful young perfectionist, I realised that my old instructors were just as passionate about teaching martial arts as I am about language teaching. Their vocation was to help students to become their best selves, not to act as gatekeepers for belt tests for the sake of keeping black belt classes prestigious! Part of good teaching means moving people onto higher material, even when they don't think they're ready, because you can see that they're not being challenged enough where they are, and you want to help them achieve their true potential. Were my beginners' coloured belt forms the best that they could be when I got moved into the upper coloured belt class, way back when? Hell no. Were they pretty good? Probably, yeah.

Did they get better more quickly after I'd started training with the higher grades? Hell yeah.

Was I any good at sparring to start with? Nope. But I wouldn't have magically learnt how from spending a few more months just hitting focus mitts.

Having a black belt is popularly perceived as a status symbols of hardassedness, but some of the most humble, kind people I have ever known were not just black belts, but black belts of the fourth degree and higher.

So, for me, my black belt is a milestone and not the status symbol I once thought it would be; but it's not one to indicate how much I've learned or that I had no more to learn in the coloured belt classes. It's a milestone to mark that my instructors decided that I was no longer reaching my current potential from solely attending the coloured belt classes and I'm ready for the black belt syllabus. Then visiting Masters agreed that I'd earned it.

I am still not Bruce Lee standard, and almost certainly never will be, but will I improve through more time sparring 2nd Dan black belts? Yep!

Are my coloured forms good? Oh, definitely Will they become better as I learn the black belt forms? Yep!

P.S. That young man? The high school languages department agreed with me 100%, by the way and my old lecturer refused to let him waste his time in the beginners class.

Here endeth the essay.