I count down the days until my Nidan – my second degree black belt – grading. Eight left. The date is coming fast – maybe too fast. Am I ready? Can I remember all the theory under pressure?

It’s been almost three years to the day since I graded for my first degree black belt. It’s different this time. It was always going to be different, but COVID made sure that this grading is going to be different on a completely different scale than what I was expecting.

I feel different this time than I did at the last grading. I feel more… peaceful? Calm? I’m not sure. But it feels different. All I know is that I’m as prepared as I can be, and there’s some comfort in that. Every week since the pandemic set in, I’ve practiced on my own, maintaining all of the katas I knew before the pandemic hit. In a way, that might have been harder than anything a one-day grading could throw at me.

Still, there’s a lot of theory to keep in my head. How does Zen feed into martial arts? How did Taoism influence Zen? How are katas similar to koans? They’re tough questions to keep straight on a good day, let alone when I’m sweating in front of my sensei.

Then there’s the fact that we can’t do most of the things we would normally do at a grading. No sparring. No practical applications. No knife defense. But I just know that, to compensate for that, everything else we do is going to be graded that much more stringently. It’s a fair trade.

My mind wanders to the fact that this grading, for the first time ever, is going to be live-streamed to students and parents of students at the dojo. I’m going to be on display, more so than ever before. It weighs on my mind that every viewer will have some sort of affiliation with Sensei’s dojo; it means that every move I make will be judged in the context of Sensei’s teaching ability. The pressure to do right by him is very real, especially as a Shodan grading for Nidan.

I feel a strong urge to practice my forms over and over again leading up to the grading. Then I’m reminded of a line from the movie Bring it On: “If you don’t got it by now, you don’t got it.”

There’s comfort in that, in knowing that we’re close enough now that whatever is going to come out at the grading is going to be what comes out. It’s been a long road to this Nidan grading, made longer by a pandemic that caught us all by surprise. But I wouldn’t change a thing; the time is right, and the circumstances have only created a different set of challenges, not diminished them.

Eight days until we find out whether I can rise to those challenges or not.