The Detours of Life and Krav Maga
By Moshe Katz, Krav Maga Instructor

April 29, 2014, Florida, USA

LauraEttaKnife
Ukraine000

I am sitting at the airport in Orlando, Florida, no reason to be here actually, strangely enough it is a stopover from Grand Rapids, Michigan, (way up north near Canada) to the Poconos in Pennsylvania. Seems like a total waste of time to fly all the way south to Florida, sit around for seven hours and fly all the way back north but that is how the airline route works.

Sometimes there is no direct route, sometimes you have to go all the way down South in order to go back North, sometimes there is simply no short cut, "there is no easy way home", and sometimes that is for the best.

So for now I am out of the cold, away from the snow and ice, and enjoying a beautiful day at the Orlando airport. It is truly a beautiful airport, with waterfalls and trees and happy people in summer outfits. I feel like I am in a tropical resort as I sip on my Florida Smoothie.

As my dear father would say sometimes you have to slow down to enjoy the view. This is a happy place filled with children wearing Mickey Mouse ears and Disney wear, and teams of happy cheerleaders in matching outfits on their way home from a national cheerleader competition. I am happy to be here, happy to enjoy this moment of life.

Such is life; sometimes the unexpected, oftentimes unwelcome and unwanted, detours, are the most beautiful and meaningful. Sometimes the desired shortcut in life is not available and we must take the long and winding road in order to learn some valuable lesson about life or about ourselves. Sometimes the detour Is the journey.

We might be taken down this detour kicking and cursing, but by the end we sheepishly admit that this is just what we needed.

Krav Maga, Self-defense, is very much the same journey, it is a microcosm of life itself; we try different methods, we get our nose smashed a few times, we wipe the blood and tears off our face and we try to figure out the lesson we just learned.

That is why our form of Krav Maga; IKI Krav, is always evolving, you can either evolve or become irrelevant. We do not wish to become "Fossil Krav Maga", or "Museum style Krav", but living breathing Krav Maga. As a living breathing creature, we will make mistakes, we will take a few unwanted detours and we will find that those detours were in fact our journey of growth.