One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my whole life was in 2007, when my brother Mike and I were in Central Java, Indonesia testing for our new rank, the rank of Khusus 1, which means Specialist Level 1 in the Merpati Putih martial arts system.
During this test… These tests are extremely rigorous. They are military type tests where you start off with a written test and then you have your movement test, and then you have a bunch of things like fighting. Have to do Vibravision, where you’re blindfolded and you have to make your way through obstacle courses, find a pot, break the pot that’s suspended from a string, then go back through the obstacle course and find different colored motorcycle helmets that are sitting on stands, and then we run.
Now, something happened, and I’ll talk about it in another video, during my movement test. But during this run, and when we talk about a run, we’re talking many miles barefoot in the middle of the night over lava rock. Yep, you heard that right. If you go out to your barbecue and you take those lava rocks and you pour them out on your patio and go walk on those, go walk on that for miles bare feet where you can’t see. It is truly a test. When you walk for miles, you go over what’s called The Road to Hell. You’re running and then you’re walking up. Some of it’s very steep. It’s called The Road to Hell for a good reason.
It is a place unlike any that I’ve been to voluntarily before in my life. I did it several times in 2005, several times in 2007, once in 2013, and you get to the PNR, the point of no return, where you go far enough on this that when the pain really sets in, it really gets a hold of you, you’re halfway through. It doesn’t matter. If you quit and go back, you have to go through all that pain, same as if you just keep going forward to success.
We came down off of The Road to Hell. We were then jogging on a road that parallels the beach, the Indian Oceans, right there off to our right. And we’d been going for so long, a couple of days without rest.
Maybe an hour or two of sleep total. Malnourished, sleep-deprived, absolutely exhausted from this ordeal, and off in the distance there is a thunderstorm just going nuts over the Indian Ocean. And we look up straight above us and there are stars. But we looked out there and it was just these giant thunderheads, just lightning bolts hitting the ocean and going in between the clouds, just lighting it up and we’re timed on our run.
You have to get back in a certain amount of time and we knew we were way ahead of everybody else. So we’re like, “Well, we can watch for just a little bit,” because have you ever just been so engrossed in a task that you totally missed the forest with the trees? That was where we were at. Very driven. We wanted to not only pass this test, but we also wanted to conquer it. We wanted to do better than anybody else we were testing with. And we were already doing that. So Mike and I stopped and we just put my arm on his shoulder and he put his arm around my shoulder and we just sat there and looked at the glory of this thunderstorm just beating the crap out of the ocean. I mean, it really was, but it was so magnificent.
And then we turned and we started jogging some more back to the final part of our test, which is the breaking part of the test, which I’ll talk about that in another video. But sometimes in our life, it’s the times when we’re the most worn out, we’re the most focused too, that is the most important time to just take a step back, look around.
You might just see the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Otherwise, it’s a good chance you’ll just miss it.