Welcome to Day 30. About 1/3 of the way to 1oo days.
I am, at this point, well past the honeymoon phase where it’s fun to have a new thing I’m doing. This wasn’t much of a honeymoon phase anyway for me, because I got the flu, and I never have managed to pick up that momentum again, but I’ve been slogging through more or less.
It reminds me that part of the point of a 100 Days experiment is that it’s about sustaining a practice. Everything we do regularly ends up being a practice. We’re not always excited and jazzed about doing it. We don’t even necessarily want to. But we do it anyway because it needs to be done, or because we need to do it. It becomes a matter of persistence and of showing up.
There are rewards, yes. But the rewards no longer come in the form of excitement and accomplishment that you’ve done the thing itself, whatever it is. When what you’re doing is has become a practice, the rewards are the things that come because you’ve continued to show up and do the work.
Over the years, in various arenas of my life, I have come across a lot of different approaches to practice. Some people recommend a technical approach to practice, choosing one very discrete thing that you’ll work on in that day’s practice, stopping your practicing when you’ve achieved the thing. Others talk about practice as a self-disciplinary thing, where the point of practice is that you put the act of practice first, and you exist for a time in service to making that practice happen. For other people it’s about forming habits.
I like to try to think of it as an experimental thing, a chance for me to find out something new or to notice something that’s different. When I do my body practice stuff, I try to pay attention to what’s going on and see how it feels today, what feels good and bad, what’s hard and what’s easy, whether things feel out of whack, whether something feels significantly different than it has before. It always makes me feel like practicing is at least a little productive, because there’s always something to notice.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers when it comes to how to make sustaining a body practice more rewarding. I do know, though, that when you keep showing up and doing it, the rewards do arrive. Not necessarily as often or as dramatically as one might ideally like, but nevertheless they do arrive. Keep it up, y’all.
