#86 Practice daily, measure progress on average

ByLukas
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The article I publish today may be worse than one I wrote 2 months ago.

I may struggle today with a guitar piece I played effortlessly last week.

And when I meditate today, my mind may be all over the place, even though last week it was calm as water.

On any given day, I may feel that I’m making progress, that I’ve reached a plateau, or even that I’m going backwards.

But it doesn’t matter.

Progress isn’t always visible in daily practice. But without daily practice, there is no progress.

If I stick to daily practice, on average, I’ll get better. I’ll start having more good days than bad. And slowly but surely, my ‘bad days’ will start being better than what I consider a ‘good day’ right now.

Progress, averaged out is what it’s all about.

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    #187 Causality on its head

    ByLukas

    You don’t have to feel certain to start taking action.

    You take action to start feeling certain.

    You don’t need to be calm to do yoga.

    You do yoga to become calm.

    You don’t need to have a quiet mind to meditate.

    You meditate to cultivate a quiet mind.

    You don’t have to speak Spanish fluently to have a conversation in Spanish.

    You have a conversation in Spanish to learn to speak Spanish fluently.

    You don’t need to know how to love to start loving someone.

    You start loving someone to learn how to love.

    And while this chain of causality sounds logical, sometimes the logical things are the hardest to remember.

  • #27 Appreciating the meaningless melody of a foreign language

    ByLukas

    Learning a foreign language is both a frustrating and liberating experience.

    We can focus on the frustration of not understanding the words the way we understand our mother tongue. Or we can realize that without the words, we are free to fall back on other ways of capturing and understanding meaning.

    A crying baby can be soothed by words it does not yet understand, because she senses what’s behind the sounds, lets the meaningless melody cradle her to sleep…

    Similarly, we don’t always have to know what’s behind the words, as long as we make an effort to understand the meaning behind the sounds.

    Hearing a foreign language brings us back to that wordless world the way we experienced it as a newborn, before we tried so hard to put everything within and around us into language.

    It makes us remember, there’s more to life than our words will ever allow us to express. And somehow, that’s a soothing thought.

  • |

    #122 You don’t have to. But you could.

    ByLukas

    You don’t have to become a writer. But you could. Even if you don’t believe it yet.

    And if knowing that you could makes you restless…

    If the fact that it’s possible makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up…

    If a persistent “What if” keeps echoing through your mind…

    Then maybe you should become a writer.

    Similarly, you don’t have to be passionate about anything. But you could.

    And if you could… what would you be passionate about?

  • #201 Nothing will be perfect

    ByLukas

    What would you finally dare to do today
    if you knew whatever you try will never be perfect anyway?

    Publish a story with typos and awkward sentences?
    Run a marathon without finishing it?
    Play a guitar piece and trip up five times?
    Sing in front of other people and miss a note?
    Try a new yoga pose in class and fall over?

    Nothing will be perfect today.
    Nothing will be perfect tomorrow.

    But if you take imperfect action
    and dare to publish imperfect work
    everything you do will have the perfect taste of progress and consistency.

    And that’s all that counts anyway.

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