Young People These Days

I don't feel old, usually, but I am the oldest person at our Jiu-Jitsu school.

Our instructor, Shawn, is about 5 years younger, and we have two other students about 5 years younger than that.

None of us feel as old as we are, or act it. There is, however, a real difference in how our brains work than is true of the younger folks.

We have one guy in his middle thirties, and he seems like us, but there is a big jump down to our herd of folks in their twenties.

Us old buggers decide to do things, and then pretty much follow through. The youngsters decide things, too, but then tend to let things slide. They still want to do it, but they don't make it happen. Of course, this is a huge generalization.

I think it's how the two groups perceive time. To us oldsters, a year is no big deal, and a mere couple of months is nothing.

Koko is a good example. She came home from university a few months back for one of those glorious, four-month, college summers. Right at the beginning she announced her intention to do her BBS1 exam. Such a thing takes tons of extra out-of-class-time work.

Month one passed, and she didn't start. Month two was the same. Month three, nothing.

It wasn't until almost month four that she got rolling, and only then when I pointed out to her the reality of how little time was left to accomplish what she was after. She still really wanted to get going, so we started doing the extra work required.

The test has three huge segments, and three small sparring ones. She got first big part recorded on July 30; the third on August 23, with the second in between. She did the first sparring video September 2^nd, and the second the next night. Only one left to go, and 4 days to do it in.

She clearly has as much drive as any of the old farts, but somehow a different sense of time.

Scott and Cosme are young, and worked towards the same test that Koko is almost done with. They each got two of the big parts done, and a couple of the little ones, and then just stalled. Time slid, and slid, and slid, and now over six months have gone by with no progress at all.

Shaw is one of us oldies. As an instructor he has to keep up with the exams. He has to complete each within a year of their release. BBS2 came out in January, so he had all of 2015 to get it done. He was finished in about four weeks, which is about as is fast as is humanly possible. No sliding; done.

I think I know how it feels to have a younger person's sense of time. Remember when you were a kid, and on your way home on the last day of school in June. You had over two months of free time stretching off into infinity before you.

I hated school. How much pain did it feel like every Monday morning when that 9 o'clock bell rang?

Of course, our young people aren't that young, but they are closer to being that age than they are to being ours.

There also seems to be a difference in asking for as much help as these tests take. Getting one done means getting somebody to agree to putting in 20-30 hours of intense, extra work, and seeming to get nothing back.

Koko never did ask anybody. I offered. Scott and Cosme never asked anybody. They acted as each others partners. Shawn not only asked for help, but he gathered a team of it. He had Scott as his partner, and me as reader (a person to call out the techniques rather than stopping to check the list frequently) and pair of outside eyeballs.

I wonder if this blog will piss anybody off. It might seem that I've just said that people under 30 are useless at getting things done, and that geezers rock. I suppose I have.

There are counter arguments aplenty.

The same Cosme who hasn't gotten his BBS1 exam completed, has gone through the similarly-difficult program to become a certified instructor under the Gracies, and that included getting himself down to Los Angeles for part of the training. This is just one example.

Nathan is still a teenager, and has pushed his training along so that he is within a hair of earning a Blue Belt. He has done this by corralling help from advanced students during open-mat time, and doing private lessons.

Anyhow, I like my basic thesis enough that I'm going to stop now, and not argue the opposite case. I'll leave that for people to do in the comments section.

Or even better; they should prove me wrong by getting BBS1 done.