C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Nothing is Worth Having in Life that Doesn’t Require Hard Work, but it Has to be Performed Correctly “By nature, men are nearly the same.   By practice, they become vastly different.” —Confucius      I have two teenage boys.   When they were younger—around 5 and 6, I think—I wanted them to become involved in martial arts.   The town where we lived didn’t seem to have much, nothing like the traditional karate-do that I practiced religiously, diligently for thirteen years, and have practiced less formally ever since.   They decided they wanted to take Tae Kwon Do—which, to be honest, I thought was a rather horrid idea; I never thought very highly of the Korean-inspired dojangs that I had encountered up to that point [1] .      But I relented.      And was quite horrified by what I encountered.   Here was a martial arts “school” where you could get a “black belt” in a year or less, where kids only a few years older than mine were walking around with 4 th