Joy Of Practice X
PRACTICE IS BEING ALIVE, PRODUCTION KILLS YOU
One of the contemporary expressions to describe success is that somebody “produces results”. A result is something that has been defined beforehand. Usually this definition has not been made by the person who later is supposed to produce it. This person just fulfills the plan designed by somebody else. She produces results.
Of course anybody who does anything produces results. Somebody causing a car accident also produces a result. It’s just not the desired one. A result can be positive or negative according to the value system of the producer or the designer of the task.
Some people like to be challenged in this way. It makes them feel good to receive a task by their boss and achieve the expected outcome or better. Often they do this for the benefits they expect for themselves: money, recognition, praise. All of those rewards come from external sources. In most cases it is the boss whose praise they seek. It is the praise of somebody they consider an authority in their life. And that is also what makes them feel good: to be rewarded by authorities provides some self-esteem.
Yet in many cases the motivation is just routine. The daily grind has become the challenge in itself. To show up and do as expected is what they get paid for. This provides for food, paying the bills and some extra consuming. But do those people really feel alive? Do they still remember how it felt when they were excited about what they do? Or is it too painful to be in contact with those memories of fulfillment and joy?
Maybe those memories had to be adjusted to the supposed gray mediocrity of daily necessities. “Producing results” for others has probably become the replacement of “fulfilling your own dreams”. Adult response as in ‘responsibility’ has become functioning in pre-designed ways. Any personal authorship with unusual and individually distinguishable characteristics is, of course, neither fashionable nor is it desired by those few who need a lot of others to fulfill their dreams.
As kids we learned so many things in such a short amount of time. Difficult tasks like elevating yourself from the floor and start walking or expressing yourself and start talking are just some of them. Yet we all shared in an incredible zeal to learn, develop, explore and discover. And all those complex processes seemed somehow playful and inspired. Is it really necessary to give up that feeling of joy – admittedly interrupted by short-term frustrations – which seems to accompany any growth?
As kids we knew how to practice. We were alive. We followed our intuition. We asked questions inside and got inspired. We also asked our parents or whoever was near for possible answers. We became impatient if somebody wanted to steal our time. Live was too interesting to waste time.
What happened to adults that they teach their children and adolescents that all this is over – the joy of discovery, exploring and creating – when you are adult?
Discovery was replaced by duty, creativity by routine. Routine supposedly builds on skills acquired in the past somewhere on the way. Another word for this is: experience. Now those experiences are re-produced again and again.
Still there are adult ‘eccentrics’ who don’t want to give up this feeling of being fully alive. Who are looking for new ways to expand their growth. Who go inside if they don’t find it outside. Who tremendously enjoy the practice of questioning their old habits and develop new skills, new movements, new ways of thinking, new ways of acting. Who love the ‘eccentric’ ability of every human being of being oneself. Who know that ‘being in harmony with the universe’ means to give their best every day in an unmistakable way. And who don’t think that they know exactly what their best is until one second before they die.
Practice is alive, otherwise you just draw on experiences of the past. How do you know that the response to this particular moment in your life can be the same than five years or even two days ago? There are those who say that you shouldn’t re-invent the wheel every time you are confronted with a problem. That depends probably of the quality of your experience. If you learned to trust your intuition, for example, you experienced something that has to be verified in this particular moment anew. No previous outcome can help you.
That what let’s you feel old is the mechanical repetition of habits so outdated that you would be sued over them if you tried to sell them as nutrients. Real practice is brimming from live and zeal to find what you didn’t find before and to incorporate the wisdom of temporary knowledge, for on the way of continuos practice there is no repetition. All knowledge is clouds passing by.
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