Practice… We talkin’ about practice? - Allen Iverson
I have been resisting this practice. I have not been wanting to write about practice. For more than two weeks I have been thinking about practice. I have been writing and not knowing what to write. I tried putting it aside and writing about something else, but that didn’t work either. On continued reflection I began to wonder if my resistance has something to teach me. This is the seventh gevurah entry in this writing practice. Somewhere in the back of my mind, this practice was always going to be seven cycles long, forty-nine weeks of reflection, nearly a year of weekly writing.
Is this struggle I’m finding myself in some kind of resistance to an ending that I have been anticipating in my subconscious, perhaps semi-conscious, mind? Is it akin to putting down a book with twenty pages left because I don’t want it to end? Is it a version of the “out of character” behaviors that young people display at the onset of an ending they are nervous about? Am I experiencing separation anxiety manifesting as severe writer's block?
Or is it simply a manifestation of my life long paradoxical relationship with the idea of practice itself?
As a child I could sit for hours with my legos building worlds, creating stories with characters I had imagined. It was a kind of practice - playing out stories that reflected the world I was learning to live in. It was a practice I was committed to, a practice I looked forward to, a practice I put many hours into on a consistent and regular basis. At the same time, this consistency, this commitment to practices was completely absent in my life at school. Throughout my childhood, from elementary through highschool, the most consistent comment I would receive on my report cards was: Jonah’s quality of work is erratic. My teachers were uniformly aghast at my simultaneous ability to produce quality work and inability to do it consistently.
This continued into my college years. I very rarely did my homework and when my friends tried to get me to join a study group my response was to claim that studying was cheating. I had a roommate who could not understand my work habits. He would often come home to find me reading on the couch but it would almost never be a book that had been assigned by one of my classes. He would rebuke me for having no discipline. I countered by saying that I had a lot of discipline, but only when it came to things I cared about. This, he claimed, was not discipline.
A few years later when I started working as a teacher I relied heavily on my improvisation skills, my ability to adapt to the situation in front of me, my penchant for meeting the moment, for being responsive to the emergent needs of my students. I took pride in the fact that I never taught the same curriculum twice. In this way I was devaluing the notion of practice.
But simultaneously my late adolescence and early adulthood, the years that I was in college and teaching high school, was the time that I was building practices that would stay with me, that would ground and center me throughout my life. In college, while I was scoffing at study groups I was also building an annual Yom Kippur journaling practice that continues more than twenty-five years later. While rejecting the value of consistency and repetition in my teaching career, I was also building a practice of making challah and hosting shabbat dinners. This practice of bread making which requires consistency and repetition has become a staple of my life.
And then there is this practice itself. Nine years ago I was invited into a practice of writing about the sefirot as a method of counting the Omer. For eight years, when the Omer came around I would join several friends in a shared google doc and write each day, for seven straight weeks - 49 days of writing.
Up until that moment I don’t think there had been a time in my life in which I did anything for 49 days in a row. It was the most consistent I had ever been about anything. And through that practices I learned a few things about myself, I recognized a few patterns about the kinds of practices that work for me. For the most part what has worked for me is to build my practices in the container of the Jewish calendar: Yom Kippur Journaling, Challah making on Shabbat, writing (or this year leading a guided meditation) during the Omer, this wring practice itself which was tied to shabbat and the weeks in a year. It seems that I enjoy practices that are time bound, that either have an end in sight or have something outside of myself to create a temporal container around them.
There are other practices I have developed, but more than any specific practices, what I have learned over the years is the practice of practice. I have come to see the ways that having practices gives me structures that allow me to return to myself. I have come to see the ways that embodying the notion of practice, slowing down to bring intention and choice into each moment, helps me ground, helps me be present, allows me to show up stronger and in line with how I want to be in the world on a more consistent basis.