What is practice?

We practice yoga, music, lines for a play, for a sporting event. Practice spans so many disciplines; it is indeed discipline agnostic.

It may be considered a tool, but calling it a tool seems to rob practice of its core. Practice is not something that is picked up and leveraged like a power tool is picked up to speed up our work in construction; though, over time, practice offers us tremendous, compounding leverage for our efforts.

Practice feels more like an investment that grows; and yet, when we stop investing, our account drains and runs dry. There is no structure charging us fees for an empty account or one that holds less than the minimum balance, but when we neglect to deposit at some regular interval, the account slowly drains and runs dry.

Practice is perhaps even more similar to a plant. Water, sunshine, at some regular interval. Though the plant can survive without these for some time, it cannot grow or thrive without the regular supply of these two essentials. The plant can wither, some leaves may yellow and dry, some branches may rot and decay, but most often the plant can return to a healthy resilience when the regularity of water and sunshine return to it.

The soil and size of the pot or land in which the plant grows is yet another factor that determines the growth capacity of the plant, but that aspect of the metaphor speaks more to the scope of our containers than to the aspect of regular practice. The scope is often fixed or changes infrequently; practice demands regularity.

What happens when we meet the demands of practice?

It rewards us greatly. Our accountability to regularly invest in a practice leads to compounding results over time. Forgive me on the armchair math, but I recollect reading that a daily compounding 1% increase over the course of one year yields a 37x increase from the original point. Huge, even if my math is rooted in hyperbole.

Why does practice demand from us? Why not simply politely ask?

Practice attaches itself to a host, the pursuit that is practiced. Yoga, music, etc. The practice seems to know that the health of its host will deteriorate if the practice no longer receives itself regular investment. Perhaps it demands from us because it knows that the pursuit will die without this accountability. My abstraction of some sort of benevolent parasite may be going a bit too far here, but I am enjoying the exploration.

Where does practice lead?

For me, practice has led to love, to rootedness, to confidence. When I regularly provide my practices (music, writing, software, meditation) with the water they crave, I see them grow over time. I do not witness the growth in real time. I most immediately feel the pain and inconvenience of the practice; it's usually a pain to go to the well, to fill the water, to walk back, to water, and avoid over watering or tend to the plant after over-stressing it.

When I show up to practice each day, I can look at my plant over a week or a month or a few months and see new branches emerging, new leaves uncurling, new flowers budding. So much so I often have so much plant that I need to prune.

But I love to prune, because then I can propagate — often these branches or leaves can be potted in a new environment and grow into their own thriving entity. These new independent plants make great gifts too, and they love to be shared.

I remember these paraphrased words from S.N. Goenka: Practice diligently, patiently, and persistently. The continuity of practice is the key to success. Practice diligently, ardently. You are bound to be successful, bound to be successful.