PRACTICE DOES NOT MAKE PERFECT
On dragons, telescopes, and why ten minutes can change everything.
An ounce of practice is worth a ton of learning.
Anonymous
Doing poor or feeble practice in the worst of times is far more meritorious than doing good practice in the best of times.
Prashant Iyengar
I practice every day, and I almost never want to.
You cannot imagine the conversations I have convincing myself to practice. I think of every reason not to. When something is intended for the end of day, I often procrastinate as long as I can until I might not do it at all. Even with swimming every morning, I have a few seconds of thinking, “maybe I’ll skip.”
People who know me cannot believe this about me. They always say, “You’re so disciplined,” usually referring to my daily swimming or daily yoga practice. Little do they know that the conversations I have with myself give meaning to the word *struggle*.
What I know from years of practicing - swimming and yoga - is that it transforms me. There are dragons to battle in the world (disappointments, rejections) and demons within (frustration and self-doubt). But there is the possibility of transfiguration with practice. Practice makes me different. And I know how hard it is to keep showing up.
My body is a like a laboratory for me. Practice is like having a flashlight to explore the dark (and sometimes scary) places. The more we practice, the more our eyes get used to the dark. The challenge is simply to switch the flashlight on. Practicing piano, learning a language, becoming proficient in the kitchen or in front of an easel with a blank canvas or the blank page: it all asks for practice.
This idea of the flashlight reminds me of a trip I took to the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. Haleakalā Observatories, one of the United States’ most important astronomical laboratories, is located on its summit. A rather otherworldly place of subalpine scrubland and black, orange, red, and silver lava flows, this was a landscape where spectacular geological violence was once part of everyday life.
Thirteen distinct telescopes that look like spaceships were poised on Mauna Kea’s snow-covered peak. The largest singular sheet of mirror in the world was there, as was the largest solely devoted infrared telescope and NASA’s telescope once in touch with the Voyager. In the presence of this resplendence and wonder, I thought about the glory and splendor of practice.
Just as the massive telescopes with their immense power open gradually and incrementally as the sun sets and the dark presents itself, practice works the same way: the greater the opening, the greater the space, the more we can see “in the dark.”
In practice, as we explore the darkness, we also connect to the mysteries of life. There is so much more to being a human being than we realize. When we penetrate inwardly, we make a connection to the divine. We meet our true selves.
We develop our rhythms and skills by **repetition**. Once engaged, just about anything that we practice with focused attention increases our intelligence and sensitivity.
Start small. An hour of swimming or writing or yoga or piano practice, verb conjugation, meditation is a crash diet. A small “stone” is ten minutes twice a week; you won’t crash or have a backache (frustration), but you will have a practice. Each stone you lay becomes part of the path.
Ultimately, what I learn from practice is that it does not make perfect and that I cannot control anything except what I put in my mouth, literally and figuratively. Yet practice gets inside like the most delicious food. Practice itself is delicious.
