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PRACTICE IS NOT PAINFUL, PRODUCTION IS!
This seems to be somewhat provocative. What is so good about practice and what is so painful about production? Of course this is not to blame anyone who is producing something. It is more about the process how that comes into being.

If you think about modern mass products, all that stuff filling those multitudes of shelves in countless supermarkets, we really want to wish for machines doing that kind of work. Otherwise – and here you may consider all those factory workers on their assembly lines – nothing might attract you to a process of permanent repetition. Imagine doing the whole day the same thing over and over again, day by day, year by year.

What happens to the people who earn their living that way? And are they the only ones doing this kind of repetitive motions? Or is their a tendency in contemporary human beings to submit to that kind of stuff?

Many people have sort of a prejudice about practice and the ways it can be done. They remember school or a despotic piano teacher and the required discipline involved and just want to run away from that memory. And they also want to run away from the present moment which requires their attention anyway.

Those torturing childhood and adolescent experiences of practice – always felt as sharing some similarities with a military boot camp – and the later chosen way of working on an assembly line or doing a similar mechanical work have something in common: they feel painful in some way or another.

What is their common characteristic? Mechanical repetition. Are human beings designed for mechanical repetition? No, they are not! Human beings are creative and designed to develop. What can they develop while repeating a certain action or a sequence of actions in a similar way?

After the initial learning process of those actions you can learn to relax under the stress of mechanical work, and that’s basically it. Hardly anyone does this in a conscious way, simply because you have to pay attention to not make any mistakes. That is the idea of mechanics: repetition without mistakes. Like a machine.

Any practice as a learning experience in the life of a child, adolescent or adult (and yes, there is so much to learn for adults if they decide to do so) which involves mechanical processes shuts down a lot of their essential being. Human beings have a tendency to improve what they are doing, and find ways to do so. This needs at least a moderate amount of experimentation. We are not even talking about anything wildly new, just the personal experience of finding a better way in doing what you are doing. This space is the minimum to be provided if you want to be treated as a human being, and if you want to treat yourself in such a way.

Not everyone has bad memories about learning and practicing. Some got teachers who knew how to  individually challenge children or adolescents. Some had private teachings of a more creative nature, and if you were really lucky, your parents had an understanding what (young) human beings need. Maybe they would challenge you to improve in a creative way without putting too much pressure on you.

Any real practice lets you discover something. It actually is a flow of discoveries. Not all of them come easy and sometimes you do seem to repeat something: but this is only to find out what hindered you to progress. The discovery you will have in any mechanical approach to any activity is that after a while your mental and physical health is getting worse. And your soul is aching of permanent no-fulfillment. All of it to get a paycheck which hardly keeps you above the waterline, ususally with the permanent threat to drown.

Countless stories about chronic backpain, tendinitis (not just for piano players and tennis pros but also for the millions of computer workers ) tell a story. The high percentage of people suffering from depression cannot be healed by chemically surpressing unwanted feelings. At one point the underlying elements will come to light, often as appearing as sickness.

The future of work can only consist in respecting the nature of human beings and provide them with activities that don´t shut them down but let them grow. What is actually the calculation about all those medical bills that shoot up into the sky  through the wrong type of activity?

Humans need to be able to consinously develop as long as they live. That would leave a lot of pain behind.  Mechanical work is poison for a human soul. Creative practice is necessary for our fulfillment and absolutely pain-free if done right.

And it always begins on an individual level with a personal decision. What kind of activities do you love to do?

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Cultivation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.