I have a very astute student who brings many insights into our dialogue. The other day he was talking about a man he knows well. My student described him as perfectly nice and friendly, a good human being. But there was something missing, he said. Searching for words, my student remarked that this man didn’t have a practice.

My mind is like a Christmas tree strung with red and green lights. If I see, hear, or think something dubious or harmful or confused or incoherent, a red light goes on: Wait! And if I see, hear, or think something constructive, creative, playful, or healing, a green light goes on: Yes!

I can’t be absolutely sure that my student and I approach the notion of practice in the same way, but I’m using his remark to adorn my tree, which my student’s remark lit up, with a bunch of green lights of my own devising.

Practice, as I see it, is a sort of commitment to explore something. The exploration unfolds steadily over months, years, and decades. There’s a repetitive element involved, and also variation, novelty, sudden changes of rhythm or focus. The exploration envelops a paradox. Practice is time spent focusing on myself and not focusing on myself. By asking myself questions while practicing, by pondering my habits, my assumptions, and my inner narrative, I might affirm my individuality and at the same time lessen my importance to my own self. “I rock! I’m just a rock.”

What might the exploration or practice involve? The possibilities are endless. It might be the study of music: handling instruments, learning the structures of music, listening, playing, going out to concerts, sharing, listening, playing, listening, playing. In my case, I consider that I’ve been in music practice for about sixty years. The practice has dug deep grooves in my brain, and it has shape my life in so many ways that I can’t begin to describe it.

Or the practice might be walking. For some, it might be the ten thousand daily steps, a sort of dance and meditation, “the gym of the mind.” Walking is a communion with the city where you live and the cities that you visit: you receive the city from the ground up, and your legs, your movement, and your rhythms create urban memories that inform your perspective in life. A walkable city is a marvelous arena for practicing. A city where cars are more important than people . . . well, driving too can be a purposeful practice. A different friend of mine is a musician of breadth and depth. He drove a taxi professionally for a few years, and it seems obvious to me that his driving helped him Achieve Knowledge (and that’s not the same thing as achieving knowledge or achieving “knowledge”).

The practice might be cooking. Recipes and spices become a discipline, giving you faint but lovely connections with Madagascar, Lebanon, Mexico, Peru, and the World and the Universe and the ALL-UPPERCASE. Or the discipline might be how you handle a knife and how you slice a tomato. I’m sure, sure! that somewhere on this Earth there’s a person who’s attained Buddhahood by Slicing the Thousand Tomatoes (and the One Finger).

Repetition on its own has many merits, but the kind of practice we’re positing here requires alertness, curiosity, involvement, observation, persistence. I actually think it’s possible for someone to just “go through the motions” of his or her practice and still get something out of it. But when you pay attention to what you’re doing, how you’re doing, why you’re doing it, what kind of person you are while you’re doing it, and what kind of person you become through doing it, the repetitiveness is a gift like no other. Your field of perception expands. You acquire skills. You accumulate memories, stories, sights and sounds attached to your practice. Practice gives you direction, and direction gives you meaning, and meaning gives you meaning. Also, Practice Gives You A Blanket, Heavy And Cozy And Soft.

Knitted by Alexis Niki over many months.

Impossible, difficult, easy. This is the archetypal road in life, bumpy but exciting.

Can the baby drive a stick shift? An automatic, maybe—an outside chance. A stick shift, no. The pedal work is out of reach. Actually, some automobile models are designed for very little drivers. But difficulties remain.

via GIPHY

What’s easy is “physically easy.” The baby driving the stick shift along Route 66 is relaxed and happy, from head to toes. Do you know how relaxed are the toes of a relaxed baby? Wonder of wonders. But the easeful state only exists because the baby “doesn’t think difficult.” No doubts, no fears, no suppositions, no preconceived ideas, no excuses, no questions, no pretzels-in-the-pysche (or as Sigmund Freud used to say, “keine Brezeln in der Psyche”).

Easy brain, easy driving. It’s in the Highway Code.

via GIPHY

A situation requires that you do something. Let’s say you’re taking language classes and your teacher asks you to translate a certain phrase from your mother tongue to the foreign one, the alien, the different, the unknown. Your very first reaction might be to think, to feel, and to say out loud: “This is difficult.” Or it might be your second reaction, after you make a feeble half-assed attempt (“halber Arsch,” sagt Sigmund) at a translation. If you try once, twice, ten times, a thousand times and you can’t manage the task, perhaps you may be right in saying that it’s difficult. But if you try zero times or maybe a single buttock (“halber Arsch”), then you don’t really mean, “This task requires quite a lot of expertise, which I lack.” You mean, “I’m being asked to leave my comfort zone. I have emotions, a history, an ingrained fear; very irrational to you, but very real to me, thank you very much! Your request pushes a button, triggers a trigger, triggers a Tiger. This is difficult!”

I’ve witnessed this dozens of times in my teaching career. The amazing thing is that, immediately after saying “This is difficult,” the student goes on to perform the task pretty well, flawlessly even. To my way of thinking, it proves that the statement wasn’t about “the thing itself,” the task, the objective situation. And, also to my way of thinking, it proves that “to acknowledge is to evacuate.”

To share your discomfort with a friendly witness lessens or dissipates the discomfort.

In Sigmund-lingo: Anerkennen heißt evakuieren, und ich spreche kein Deutsch, das ist alles aus dem Internet.

Chicas Malas Hit And Run GIF from Chicasmalas GIFs

There’s the thing, and there’s our perspective on the thing. Our perspective feels so concrete, so embodied in us that we confuse it with the thing. We become sure, sure, sure that we’re thinking and talking about the thing, when in fact we’re thinking and talking about our own selves. We sometimes have a flash of clarity by proxy. “This tax form is impossible to fill,” someone says. “Idiotic bureaucracy!” And we look at the damn form, and it’s pretty straightforward, and the instructions are clear, and all you have to do is to write in a number and check a box. And we understand that our friend has amalgamated his or her deep-seated and long-held emotions with the form, the task, the appliance, the musical instrument, the medical procedure, the social obligation, the—well, you know what I’m talking about.

The thing doesn’t have to be you, and you don’t have to be the thing.

Sigmund, sing your song!

“Das Ding muss nicht du sein,

und du musst nicht das Ding sein.”

via GIPHY

I’ll do a numbered list for you: “The Seven Habits of Highly Confusing Geminis.”

Your mind plays a role.
Some things are “literally impossible.” Don’t confuse them with things that are “not-literally impossible.”
Man or woman not yet born for whom EVERYTHING IS EASY.
“Things change.” “You change.” “Your relationship with things change.”
Not every numbered list is useful.
Just because it’s easy for you it doesn’t mean that “it” is easy.
Pedrito, you’ve made it to the end of another blog post! Auf Wiedersehn!

Kid Driving GIF from Kid GIFs