Starting to get back into the groove.

An unbelievable amount of information from Steve to process. This man took a tiny section of a 4-dimensional dynamic sphere (any profound movement discipline connects with the rest of life so as to embrace the totality of human experience. But Ed Parker didn't give his commercial students the full sphere. He didn't even promote Steve directly. We won't go into the motivations for this here--except to say that Parker was an exceptional man, but a man of his times.) But as anyone who understands geometry can recreate a full circle given any three points. By a lifetime of experimentation, he not only found the way of fighting that works for him, but for thousands of students. But then he began caring passionately about his community, so he started lecturing us about how if you can learn martial arts, you can be anything you want. His spiritual connection to Islam takes him even deeper: he's aligned and congruent, "coherent" perhaps, with every aspect of his life supporting every other aspect.

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And he's balanced: a beautiful family, a thriving career (owns a security company), and an absurd level of physical efficiency. I know of no 70 year old man, anywhere, who can do the things he does. And still spars regularly with students a third his age--often experienced martial artists from other styles, and simply dominates them. It's ridiculous. His efficiency is so high that he can move SLOWLY and still destroy your position effortlessly. While he no longer explodes up and down the floor doing hundreds of martial wind-sprints a day, his initial explosion is just as volcanic, and his follow-up, in close range, is more like Wing Chun than Kenpo. Except with a kind of torquing power that had Chinese grandmasters looking at him and shaking their heads, I kid you not. In other words, he embraced the scientific method big time. He's had over a thousand street fights. Still has them--leading his troops into battle regularly, in a context embraced by by law and his church.

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What does this lead to? Well...I'm going to say this, understanding how it sounds. It is quite possible that Steve Muhammad is the best man I've ever known. I've watched him for 35 years, and watched the impact he's had on countless lives. He has the same flaws that the rest of us have, but somehow he has managed to walk his walk as purely has Harlan Ellison has walked the line of his career. And that is SERIOUS purity, let me tell you. I feel incredibly blessed to have a man like this in my life, and I suspect that the road ahead for me is going to be clearer than much of the road behind.

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Almost twenty years ago, Mushtaq asked me: "what kind of 70 year old do you want to be? Well, whatever it is, you'd better get started working on it."

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Steve Muhammad is almost EXACTLY the kind of 70 year old I want to be. In a world of boys, he is a man. By bonding his physical and mental skills (he is a kinesthetic genius, on the level of any genius I've ever known. The mathematical precision of his thought excels his ability to convey it with language. Hopefully, I'll be able to help him here) to his family life and his spiritual life, he has done exactly what martial arts masters and grandmasters have done for centuries: transformed an athletic activity into a holistic life path. An international panel of Grandmasters said that he had actually created a new martial art. I think what he's done is as significant as what Ueshiba did in transforming various Jiu Jitsu forms into Aikido. But more than that, at 70 he's still kicking ass, taking names, and saving young men from the streets.

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I walked one of the shopping centers that he protects in Atlanta. When he took it over, there were like fifty gangsters hanging around, chasing away the customers and killing business. He and his men took these guys out back, and...well, you can imagine.

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I met some of the guys he did this to, and they are all, like: "good evening, Mr. Muhammad. Can we help you, Mr. Muhammad? (to their friends, with pride:) This is Mr. Muhammad!" The shop owners adore him. Mothers thank him for protecting their daughters. It was amazing. They LOVE him. His men love him. His students love him. The damn gangsters whose heads he whipped love him.

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And dammit, I love him, right down to my toes. He and Larry Niven are the closest things to a father I have, and I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to have them. Maybe the best trip I've ever had.