Esteemed Reader

“If I fail to practice for a day, I notice the difference. If Ifail to practice for two days, my wife notices the difference. If I fail to practice for a week, even the audience notices the difference.”
—attributed to a famous pianist

An oft-repeated adage suggests that practice leads to perfection. But what if what we are always practicing is imperfection? Does that mean we become perfectly flawed? We are always practicing something. Every moment of every day we are becoming more adept—whether it be intentional or unconscious. So why not practice intentionally? There are many opportunities.

Everything we do is an opportunity for refinement; whether it’s putting on socks, launching a rocket, firing off a tennis serve, licking one’s lips, greeting someone “Good Morning,” stroking our beloved, programming a database… Each thing can be practiced, refined, so that we are not good at just a few things, but good at everything, from the exalted to the most prosaic.

The key to practice—nay, all learning—is attention. The more attention we have the more we can learn and progress. Attention is the lubricant that allows knowledge to slide from the outside world to the mind and from the mind to the body. It allows a theory to spring into action.

Since when we practice anything, we are really practicing attention, it follows that the inverse is also true; that is, that in practicing attention, we are also practicing everything. So if we practice doing well the things we don’t care about, we will become better at the things we do care about. Hence, the saying of a modern saint: “he [or she] who shits well, prays well.”

Think of your poor wife or husband or girlfriend or boyfriend and how it will be for them when you get bored of their company. Little by little they will become less mysterious and compelling. Eventually they will not only be boring, but irritating. How will they feel when your “love” turns sour? What is that sourness, really? It simply means that we can’t bear to pay attention to them anymore. But what if we were practicing attention the rest of time—while we still found them compelling? What if we learn how to love while it still comes naturally, so that when we stop “loving”—as we inevitably do with everything that is no longer new—we can summon our reserves and pay attention anyway? How about that?

All right, then. Try it. Try closing the door as a graceful act, soundlessly. Try making your walk into something beautiful. Try doing the dishes as a devotional practice. Try doing whatever you do as well as you can, so that it isn’t just the big things that count, but all the little details. After all, it is big things that the details comprise.

—Jason Stern