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I have always liked saying that I grew up between a cornfield and a coal mine. It sounds almost like something invented for a story, but for me it is simply the truth. I was born and raised in Otwell, a small farming and mining community in southern Indiana, and much of what eventually shaped my life began there. Long before karate became part of my identity, before black belts, instructors, seminars, travel, or recognition, there was family, hard work, responsibility, and a small community where people understood that everybody had a part to play.

My childhood was a good one. I had two loving parents, a younger brother, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and people throughout the community who looked out for one another.

When I was growing up, children were expected to participate in the work around them. If a farmer needed help getting hay into the barn, you helped. If chickens or turkeys needed to be caught, you helped with that too. If there was work to be done on the farm, you did not stand around waiting for somebody else to handle it. You were part of the community, and being part of the community meant contributing.

At the time, I never thought of those experiences as lessons in character. Nobody sat me down and said, “Greg, today we are going to teach you responsibility.” Life itself did the teaching. A farmer's livelihood depended on a good crop. Animals needed to be fed. Hay had to be brought in. Crops had to be cared for. When adults trusted you with a job, you learned quickly that what you did affected somebody other than yourself. Looking back now, I can see that many of the principles I would eventually carry into martial arts were already being planted in me.

One of the places I remember most clearly was the old barn. It was made of wood and covered by a metal roof. It was not one of those enormous barns that dominate the landscape, but it had everything a working farm needed. There was room for two tractors, space for the horses, an area where the cows could be brought in for milking, a chicken roost where the hens laid their eggs, a corn crib where feed could be kept, and a hayloft above us. It was practical, worn, busy, and completely normal to me.

The barn had a personality of its own. When rain hit that metal roof, the sound could fill the entire building. A hard Indiana rain did not tap politely overhead. It hammered the roof, and when you stood beneath it, you felt surrounded by the storm even though you were protected from it. During other seasons, the old wood would crack and pop as temperatures changed. There were always sounds around you: chickens scratching and calling, a rooster crowing in the morning, cows mooing, horses shifting, birds outside, tractors coming and going, and people working.

Then there were the smells. Anyone who has spent much time around a farm knows that hay has a distinct smell, especially when a hayloft is full. Add cows, horses, chickens, feed, old wood, dust, and everything else that belongs in a barn, and you get something difficult to describe but impossible to forget. I never thought about those smells as a boy because they were part of everyday life. Now, after all these years, I can still remember them. Sometimes memory does not return through words. Sometimes it returns through a sound, a smell, or a picture you have carried quietly in your mind for decades.

Mim would sometimes send us out to gather eggs from the chicken roost. We would move the chickens aside, collect the eggs, and clean them before taking them into the house. I remember a time before running water worked in the house the way people expect today. There was a pump outside, and there was also a pump at the kitchen sink that sometimes had to be primed before the water came through. We would clean the eggs and bring them inside, and Mim would prepare them for us.

Today, people talk about food being “farm to table” as though it is something unusual or sophisticated. We did not call it farm to table. We just ate breakfast.

That is one of the things I appreciate about where I came from. Life could be difficult and work could be physical, but there was something very direct about it. You understood where things came from. You saw the effort involved. You knew that food did not simply appear at a store and that a farm did not operate because one person did everything. People depended on one another. When children were given work, it was not because adults wanted to make life miserable for us. They were bringing us into the rhythm of the community.

I learned that lesson in plenty of humorous ways too. One of my uncles taught me to milk a cow when I was probably around seven or eight years old, perhaps even younger. I remember him milking one morning while I decided I would sneak up on him. Apparently, I was not nearly as quiet as I imagined. Before I knew it, he had aimed at me and squirted milk directly into my face. Then, instead of giving me a lecture, he brought me over and showed me how to milk the cow.

That was a very common way of learning where I grew up. People showed you what to do. They expected you to pay attention and then try it yourself. One of my uncles later expressed an idea that stayed with me throughout my life: don't just tell me; show me. As I became an instructor many years later, that became part of the way I wanted to teach. A young person can hear a hundred instructions, but when you demonstrate something and then let that person experience it, the lesson becomes real.

There were also lessons that came from not paying attention. Mim had a fishpond, and she told us not to play around it. In our young minds, we imagined this pond must have been incredibly deep. One day my little brother fell into it and immediately stood up. We discovered it was only about a foot and a half deep. The real problem was that while we were fooling around near the pond, we had trampled Mim's flowers. Suddenly her warning made more sense.

Then there was the coal bin. The house had a coal-burning stove, so coal had to be stored in the basement. We had been told not to go into the coal bin. Naturally, children have a way of becoming fascinated by whatever they have specifically been told to avoid, and we went into it anyway. We ended up covered in coal dust and had to scrub ourselves clean in the bathtub. Grandpa found the entire situation amusing. Mim did not.

I can laugh about those memories now, but they taught something that became increasingly important later in life: sometimes people give you instructions because they know what you cannot yet see. A child hears a rule and thinks it is unnecessary. A student hears a correction and wonders why it matters. An athlete hears a coach repeat the same instruction and becomes impatient. Then experience arrives and explains the lesson more effectively than words ever could.

Listening, I would eventually understand, is not simply hearing sound. It is respecting the possibility that the person speaking may know something you need to understand.

Another important part of my childhood was sports. Our school was small, and there were not dozens of athletic programs to choose from. We had baseball, basketball, track, and cross-country. If you were a boy and an athlete, you were probably involved in most of them. One season ran straight into another. Cross-country ended and basketball began. Basketball moved into track. Track and baseball overlapped. When school sports slowed down, farm work took over the summer.

That schedule suited me because I was never very good at sitting still. I liked moving. I liked competing. I liked doing things physically. I was not a big kid, and I would spend much of my life being one of the smallest people in the room. Eventually I grew to about five feet six inches. I was fast and wiry, and I learned early that if I could not rely on size, I could rely on speed, preparation, and determination.

Being the smaller person meant people sometimes underestimated me. That happened in sports, martial arts, and probably other areas of my life. I do not remember being consumed by resentment about it. If anything, it gave me something to prove, but not in the sense that I wanted to become better than everybody else. I wanted to show that I could do what I had decided to do. Being small was a fact. It did not have to become a limitation.

That distinction matters to me. Some people spend their lives fighting against the way others see them. I learned that it was more useful to concentrate on what I could control. I could not control my height. I could control my effort. I could control whether I trained. I could control whether I listened to people who knew more than I did. I could control how prepared I was when the opportunity came.

Sports gave me confidence before karate ever entered my life. So did farm work. There is confidence that comes from praise, but there is also confidence that comes from usefulness. When adults trust you with work that matters, you begin to understand that you are capable. When you train for sports, compete, win, lose, return, and improve, you learn that discomfort does not have to stop you. Karate would later deepen that confidence, but it had already begun to grow through the life I was living.

My first real spark of curiosity about karate came from a book. I wish I could remember the title and the author's name, but I cannot. I found it at a book fair, and what I remember most clearly is the cover. There was a martial artist kicking up into the air. The book appeared to teach some of the basics of karate, and something about it immediately caught my attention.

I was intrigued by the movements, but I was even more intrigued by the fact that this was something I had not experienced before. Baseball made sense to me. Basketball made sense. Running made sense. Karate seemed to come from another world. I did not yet understand the history behind it or the culture that produced it. I simply knew that I wanted to know more.

I sometimes wonder whether that book might still be somewhere in the old house, perhaps buried in a box or tucked away in the bedroom where some of my childhood things remained. I would like to see it again someday, not because I expect the book itself to contain some secret knowledge, but because of what it represented. Sometimes an ordinary object becomes important because of what it awakens in you.

That book awakened curiosity. Curiosity made me search.