Practicing the craft, skill

 It comes to you, eventually.

You cannot force it, rush it, you cannot wish it into reality. You cannot stiffen yourself, be sleepless and do it all at once. The more you do, the easier it gets. It's hard work, needs determination, commitment, dedication. A real desire to change yourself, to be a person different from your current self. A slightly more disciplined person. Perhaps a little bit more boring if I may say so, maybe not.

Patience, you need patience.

I'm writing about meditation, the 20-minute sessions I've been doing for the last two weeks. It might as well have been about writing, woodworking, or anything else. Any skill that needs real dedication and commitment.

Importantly, it needs a teacher. Good teachers are hard to come by. With a self-improvement practice like meditation the self can be the teacher, observing and modifying behavior without external intervention.

For writing it's different. It's not easy to tell what you're doing wrong, the self cannot be an impartial judge of what is good and what's not. It can go both ways, the self can be too needy and consider everything it creates to be a masterpiece, unable to as they say in creative circles, 'kill its babies'. Letting go of the ego and pride of having created something good, when in reality it's a pile of crap is not easy. It can go the other way too, being overly judgmental and critical of one's writing, unsure about the direction that works, waddling in mediocrity always because one's not confident about that which is good.

What's important is the practice, the constant honing of the craft. A submission to it really, it cant be a chore that you fear doing, it must bring joy, excitement, or at the very least an ungrudgning acceptance that the practice will be a part of your life forever and ever, like brushing your teeth. The self control to ignore everything else and get to it when the time demands. Ability to keep going on days that are so good you think a disciplined practice is a crutch, and on days that are not so good when you think such a practice is a total waste of time, that you're not going anywhere. It needs to be beyond the self-judgment. Just as you never judge the need of brushing your teeth, regardless of what's been eaten over the day, you need to make the practice of your craft free from your emotional and physical state generally. When you're incapicitated you're incapicitated, but those are the extraordinary circumstances.

Quite important is also the ability to have the fire burning in your heart, a deep desire to improve and grow. It's irrelevant how menial or simple the task is, you can get better it, you can make it better. A vacation rest of 5 days when you skip your practice shouldn't take your the practice out of your awareness, coming back to it should feel like sleeping in your bed...how things are normally. The practice becomes slowly a part of your, an extension of existence.

It's not easy to see the improvements, even with a good teacher, for they are gradual. Day over day things feel the same. One day you wake up and end up comparing yourself to the time you started, and you realize you've become a different person. An improved human being. That's when you know you've got it, the world is at your fingers.