In defense of a sloppier practice routine…

I’ve long idealized the idea of a daily practice.

I love saying “I walk every morning” or “I make a daily painting” or “each day I find time to block out the world and get into the zone with my music practice.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sounds great but at least for me, this remains aspirational. Or it works for a while until it doesn’t.

Which could be fine…

The trick for me is to not let the end of the streak mean the end of the practice.

For a while I used DuoLingo for Spanish. Did it every single day. It was fun. When I broke my streak I stopped completely. Never went back. No more Spanish for Nancy I guess! Hmmmmm.

Kind of ridiculous but that’s how it tends to go.

We can get more attached to the streak than to the purpose of the practice. In other words the streak has a way of becoming more about keeping the streak than about keeping Spanish, walking, or music a regular part of our life.

And when we do that we must evoke some kind of “I failed” hormone or something, because it can be really hard to start up again.

It’s dangerous!

I now prefer to think of myself as having “a practice.”

It’s there for me to drop into anytime I can or want to. It doesn’t go away if I miss a few days (or months or years). I’ve so much more success and joy this way.

Let me know what you think!

Love,

Nancy

P.S.

I even wrote a blog post about it…

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