Reflections on Becoming a Grandfather (again)
21 June 2015
Lincoln Bennett Kimball was born at 1 am Pacific time on
June 18. I celebrate Lincoln’s arrival, I am happy for the parents Peter and
Anne. I am grateful and admiring of Anne in the labor of carrying to term and
delivering a healthy baby boy.
And I am proud and happy for myself. Yet I did nothing. So
why am I proud and pleased?
In Korea in the ‘70s I befriended a young man (more
accurately, he befriended me and he was young in reference to me today but probably
29 to my 20 at the time) who was a newly minted Mormon and an experienced and
practiced 3d-dan Tae Kwon Do black belt. Jae lived at the Do Jang and taught
and studied Tae Kwon Do.
Jae told me that the color belts were training ranks for
beginners, with the objective of reaching the black belt, and the 1st
degree black belt was really the beginning of serious Tae Kwon Do practice. He
explained the training, competition, forms, and development, over years of
practice, required to advance from one black belt to the next. He explained
that it would take 20 or 30 years or more of even the most disciplined and
successful commitment to reach the 6th-dan or 6th degree
black belt, and that there were not very many and they were mostly found as the
heads of the best known schools. Then he explained the 7th-dan,
which he said did exist in his style or school, but with only one or two examples
in the world. And what makes a 7th-dan black belt? It isn’t getting
faster or stronger or jumping higher or becoming world champion. What makes a 7th-dan
black belt, he explained, is to have a student who reaches the 6th-dan.
I’ve thought about all that it takes, to be good enough in
one’s own skills, and good enough to teach, and good enough to attract students,
and then all the subtle guides and time and luck to have a student advance in
the ranks. How much personal effort, and skill on a wide variety of levels. How
much luck. How much perseverance. How much has to happen with little or no
control.
Lorenzo Snow, the fifth president of the Mormon Church, is
credited with teaching that “as God is, man may become”. I do not understand
this teaching, and I’m not sure I believe it, at least not in any of the
traditional meanings. But the idea of a 7th-dan black belt is the
closest I’ve come. Perhaps even the idea of a god is not someone faster or
stronger or better, but a being in a new class that depends entirely on others
reaching greatness.
Becoming a grandfather feels like that 7th-dan black
belt. It’s the greatest achievement of my life, with me doing almost nothing.
