Repetition is just another name for practice. Repetition is just another name for practice. To practice is to repeat the action. To repeat the action until the form of it becomes as tight and giving as muscle memorized and flexed. Lift that weight, set after set. Gird. Fold at the waist. Grab, heave, grit. It doesn’t hurt to. Begin again. Repetition is just another name for practice. The practice is the lesson, which is ongoing and lasts a lifetime. If you’re doing it right. Ten thousand hours1 is an estimate worth exceeding. Hours, like waters, swell over your laziness levee to stretch out and flood brain plains. You are bucketing it away to reveal your fertile earth. You have been given a thimble to do so. You are grateful for this thimble. Repeat after me, with me, alongside me. Begin again. Repetition is just another word for practice. Within the practice are buried keys to many doors. Right and wrong doors. Bad and good doors. Frightening and go-nowhere doors. The repeated opening of these doors will create drafts. Swing them wide. Draft. Draft. Draft. Step in. Enter the do-over enlightenment era. Begin again. Repetition is just another name for practice. Repeat until the shape of it is the shape of you and that shape is pure craft. The result is irrelevant, benevolent, an elephant. Perfection has no shape. Perfection is every shape. It is an oblong, a rhombus, a dodecahedron, a shape-shifting-of-no-consequence blob that lives in try and dies in trite. Restate the objective, slough off corners, shine up surfaces, lament the fallen almost was-es. Begin again. Repetition is just another name for practice. Work the body until the body works. With each output refine your being, peel off layers, and discover that, there. You. Nude. What are you capable of? What are you capable of again? What are you capable of again and again, and again? In the stark au naturel of repetition, you are bespoke clothed. If the suit fits, wear it. If it’s too big or too small, make adjustments. Begin again. Foundation is found in the noodling. Sounds and tones and breath and body. Tap that baton against the repetition rostrum. Raise your instrument. Begin again. Repetition is just another name for practice. Repetition is just another name for practice.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
What you ought to do is write you big lazy bastard. My god it is hard for anybody to write. I never start a damn thing without knowing 200 times I can’t write—never will be able to write a line—can’t go on—can’t get started—stuff is rotten—can’t say what I mean—know there is a whole fine complete thing and all I get of it is the bacon rinds. You would write better than anybody but the minute it becomes impossible you stop. That is the time you have to go on through and then it gets easier. It always gets utterly and completely impossible.
Thank God it does—otherwise everybody would write and I would starve to death.
- Ernest Hemingway, from a letter to Waldo Pierce, 1st Oct 1928
The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 2
Via Letters of Note
On Rotation: “Rose” by Fifty Foot Hose
Too early for a cry?
Fishing for velocipedes and related species in Amsterdam.
Via 13 Things I Found on the Internet Today
Ten thousand is just a number—or a metaphor, as Gladwell explains here. Point is, you have to put in the time to master something. And, um, you might still not be any good at it at the end of it.