It was 15 years ago, in the summer of 1994, that Tim Brown and I sat down to figure out a name for our little training group. I had moved to NYC a few months before and was living in the hallway of Tim’s apartment in Park Slope, where his roommates David and Jimmy were kind enough to tolerate my poverty.

We decided that we weren’t a formal dojo, even though I was a godan at the time, since we didn’t really have a consistent place to call our own. And it was never intended to be purely my responsibility anyway — after all, Tim and I had started training in the Bujinkan on the same day, even if I technically outranked him at that point.

So we sat down with a Japanese dictionary, and somehow decided we liked the idea of Nothingness implied by the word mu. We essentially scanned the dictionary for words that started with mu (and the appropriate kanji, of course), found the word muzosa, and the rest is history.

From such random moments do we draw our history. We”ve been training in the same spot in Central Park since 1994 (among other places) because Tim and I both worked nearby: he taught stage combat at AMDA (Academy of Musical and Dramatic Arts) on 73rd St., and I was a personal trainer at Equinox on 76th St.

Now, 15 years later, we’ve been fortunate to have a positive influence in the lives of scores of students. That spot in Central Park is like another home to me, I know it so well. And it turns out that the heavens watch over children and fools, since our haphazard choice of a name for our dojo, which could have been a silly failure, actually turned out to accurately reflect the full range of our budo perspective: “simple, without artiface; with the appearance of carelessness.”

The next step is to bring our skill up to this lofty ideal. We’ll see what happens in the next 15 years.