It's also about developing a habit. Till now I've had a notebook; I'll still carry that round with me. It's contained business cards, clothing designs and setlists; ramblings and sketches; all the sundry crap that comes to mind as I'm pottering about living. I want to put bits of that notebook online so I can order these ideas; I can tag posts and check for associations between thoughts. I can also link to other sites and other little mental 'journeys'.
Speakin' of habits, I was thinking about the meaning of practice.
As a kid, practice meant something done routinely I guess - but it also meant something that wasn't 'for real' - oh I'm just having a 'practice run'. To me, it also became synonymous with terribly boring things; after all, if a thing is no fun, it can only be made less fun by doing it over and over again!
And then there's this word:
Praxis:
1. Practical application or exercise of a branch of learning.
2. Habitual or established practice; custom.
Say, what's that? It's implying a practice that's mentally focused, in a way - take some philosophy, do something with it - but it also seems more, ahem, practical than a lot of the so-called 'practice' one does as a kid. Making noise on a violin, doing the same math problem 20 times or catching curve-balls is such rote learning that it doesn't seem connected to anything. Nor is it even very brain-straining - I mean you could argue that doing an algebra problem is working your mind out, but if so, it's more like doing 20 reps with a dumb-bell than running over an obstacle course. It's not very engaging. And there's no meta-thinking.
Then there's the bit I hate, because I hate anything that implies a commitment; the practice that occurs so regularly, so often, that it becomes customary. Oh dang, it's become a part of your life now! Scary as that is, I want to have a solid go at establishing patterns of practice - all over the show - in order to help order my brain and be a better thinker - but also to save time and effort and generally worry a lot less. So there's the guts of my motivation for this weird little blog. Hopefully doing it over and over - whatever it may become - won't become boring but just the opposite.
The essence of any practice or discipline in the sense to which you refer is that it is practice in making oneself predictable. That is, someone who has a practice, or discipline, can rely on themselves (and others can rely on them) to do what they intend to, and what they say they will, despite how boring or annoying or inconvenient it might be at the time. And that's the only way to develop a Will, in the sense that Crowley would have understood.
ReplyDeleteSome notes from Robert Fripp on practice:
"A practice requires reliability, repeatability, and response-ability.
A discipline confers effectuality in time.
A discipline is a body of practices that, taken together, forms the structure of our interior architecture.
[...]
Recapitulation is an easily forgotten element of a practice. Our experiencing of the day escapes us.
The key word is attention. The quality of our attention determines the quality of our practice and discipline. The quality of attention determines the quality of our lives. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that all we have in life is the quality of our attention."