This is what I think about that: Discipline in Practicing at 15:08

The schoolyear has started again - back to San Francisco, back to public transportation, back to little girls running up and down the hall above my room.

I intentionally took a long (relatively) break from marimba after ZMF because of my injuries. There is a whole other post I can, and will maybe write about how good rest is, so I won't talk about it now.

In this past week and a half since I moved in and set up Rose again, I rediscovered how difficult it is to practice. In the first few days, I rarely touched my mallets for more than an hour or two, since I didn't feel like it.

It's a bit of an alien tenet that I have, to not practice unless I want it. Shouldn't a musician practice even when he/she doesn't want to? Well, I noticed in my growth and habits of practicing that I always get more accomplished when I have that urge - it's like an overpowering hunger to work my brain, absorb new notes and hear my marimba. And when I have forced myself to practice when I don't want to, I would come back the next day and realized I retained nothing from the day before. It is better for me, therefore, to only practice when I want to. Luckily for my career, it seems I want to practice sufficiently to continue and improve.

But in the past week, I have had to reconcile my romantic ideal of practice habits with the more unforgiving, traditional approach of constant practice in spite of dread. Most of the days I didn't want to practice at all, and I would turn my computer off anyway and go. I would spend a few hours cleaning and cooking and goofing off in the afternoon to procrastinate, but sooner or later I'd realized I had too much time and I ought to be working anyway.

What I found is that, once I got started, I would be in the zone sooner than I thought, and hours would fly by while I sight read or memorized or just did exercises. It got much easier to keep practicing after I started, like waking up in the morning, or flossing. I felt the same progression and accomplishment in these begrudgingly invested hours as those precious passionate ones that come by every once in a while.

And though I've felt like practicing perhaps only one day this past week, I've memorized three of four pages of Preludios I, Salpicao, by Thomas Oboe Lee. This is probably my favorite part of practicing - at the end of the week, or even a day or an hour, I get to look back and say, "Well, I couldn't do that when I started."

Enough wasting time - I'm gonna go finish the last page now.