practice & repetition

David Christie - Three swans in flight

These days the black birds don’t swarm the skies like they used to, but San Francisco is still hauntingly beautiful. Pretty from the sun-lit hills of Strawberry Canyon, the brilliant green blue coast collapsing into itself; Pretty on M’s balcony in twin peaks, a stripe of light running vertical through the main streets, pooling in gold where tributaries of road meet the 101; Pretty in the slick of rain on the Muni home.

It’s been raining a lot. The smell of rain is deeply familiar: lilies, drainage pipes, and moss. My childhood was full of rainstorms. Deep torrential rainstorms that left the world shivering and glossy and colder in their wake. Whenever a monsoon lifted, I’d walk into the forest near my home. I’ve probably walked the same path 1000 times and each time felt something different. Sometimes the trees seemed greener, or the path seemed shorter or longer. The colors felt softer or more vivid. The birds’ flying patterns shifted.

What that walk made me feel is something I’ve been trying to articulate simply for a very long time. You can do something mundane a million times and still discover something profoundly alive, novel, and worth wonder. I’ve seen this before, but I choose to see it with new eyes.

Repetition is an opportunity to know something deeper than when you first experienced it. It's why Monet painted over 300 water lily canvases over three decades, why Leonard Cohen took 2 years to write the song Hallelujah, drafting one verse 180 times, Rothko's obsession with stripes, Mondrian’s squares. That’s what mastery is at its core. Doing something thousands of times over affords you a more intimate relationship with the activity in question: you see more clearly, the practice is deeper and more sacred.

A true practice is one that you repeat whether or not it feels successful or even good all the time. Actually, most times it’ll feel sort of useless and very challenging. There’s a clear, yawning, empty space between where you are and where you want to be. You’ll spend the rest of your life attempting to close that gap. Yet, a practice is something that you believe in regardless of the certainty of failure and missteps. You return to it again patiently, a disciple of the craft, because it matters to you. Practice can be your version of devotion or prayer to the world.

I thought about this concept a lot this week because I never feel like I have enough time these days — for admittedly good reasons. I’m actually very engaged in my reality for the first time in a really long time. I like my work and my relationships, I like writing. I’m grappling with participating in the fullness of life with high effort.

Still, I continue to practice writing because I enjoy the act of getting closer and deeper: feeling out of my depth and then relaxing into it. Repetition is a humbling act: Writing. Rewriting. Tunneling into an idea. Losing the thread. I still find it difficult. I still find it captivating. Maybe that’s what love is anyways: even when you’ve done something a thousand times, it still holds a renewable beauty.

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PPS: a note on writing and working: I can only really find the time and the right headspace to write from 11pm-12:30am these days. Practice is hard, but that’s what makes it worth it. Has there been anything I truly value that I didn’t work for? The answer is no.

But as a result, I’m writing pieces that are more stream of consciousness, and probably not as fully formed as they could be. But that’s my… honest capacity at the moment. I don’t think many writers discuss writing creative pieces regularly with a (very unrelated) full time job. It just means still choosing make art when you don’t feel perfect, recognizing that there’s no world in which perfection exists anyway. There’s never enough light, air, space, and time.