In Which I Ought to Apologize Profusely for Quasi-Mystical Language and What May Appear to Be Random Capitalization

But I don’t.

Because I’m running around in the manner of the newly decapitated Gallus gallus domesticus in preparation for flying with the four boys to Albquerque on Saturday, only this is the week one set of boys has camp in the morning another set has camp in the afternoon and trying to keep track of where everyone is/ought to be feels like patting my pockets for keys and phone every few minutes and flying into a panic when things aren’t quite as I think they ought to be. Plus I just got summoned for jury duty and need to deal with that before I go out of town, as well as emailing my parents my children’s dietary preferences (which are varied and contradictory), renting a viola for the second child since violas are technically too big to be carry-on on Southwest airlines, finding performance outfits for each of them, coming up with a plan for the fourth child’s birthday while we are there, and dealing with things like library books due next week and regular lessons and the food in the refrigerator which I am just going to have to throw out.

But that’s not what’s preoccupying me, anyway.

Which is ancient. Actually.

The wrestling that I do is with where one comes up with the humility to strive at the limits of one’s abilities even if one feels completely mediocre?

If you were here sitting across from me, and we were to have the leisure for a real conversation, this is what I would want to ask you.

I have been wrestling with the acknowledging that to apply oneself to a Discipline is to come to terms with the Discipline having degrees, to having better and improved Practicing, which I keep getting stuck with logically meaning some practitioners are better at the Discipline, and with only a little more logic, meaning some practitioners are worse.

And that practicing a Discipline involves wanting to get better at it. And that this does involve both refinements, abrading the bad habits, adjusting Technique for desired results (I somehow see Discipline as being composed of Technique and Expression; I would love for you to digress and argue with me). But all of the incremental bits of improvement may result in the apparently sudden “quantum” ascent from one plateau to another

And because the practice and application of one’s deepest self to the Discipline is Work and sometimes — often, in fact, is something other than rewarding — I mean, tedious, exhausting, precariously doubt-filling, lonely, sweaty, achey or terrifying — it must be driven by a sort of desire. My first identification is that my desires are for glory/respect/approval/acceptance or, (sigh) sometimes ass-kicking competitiveness and Showing Them vengefulness, but I recognize some ‘pure’ desire beyond these little insecure self-based ones. For the Discipline itself. For the smudging of the boundaries of self within the perfection of the Discipline itself, as if the Discipline itself were doing the desiring, and it is no longer the self. I trip over my Ancient Greeks and the notion that happiness is the cessation of desire, and yet believe in the deep happiness of communing with the Discipline.

[Here my religion creeps in, and the closest I can come to defining my religion is as a sort of awareness of the self as created and separate from the Creator, a place where humility lives, the ardor and longing of the creation for Creator, for reunion.]

When I cannot manage humility I remind myself too much of myself as a little kid, really struggling against doing something imperfectly — learning to ride a bike, where there is one major plateau to jump to, and all of the attempts that are not riding a bike eventually are followed by the attempt that is riding a bike; but this little kid in me gets frustrated at doing it imperfectly, wants to kick the stupid bike and go do something safe and satisfying like riding on my old very fast Big Wheels which can make it down to the dead end of our street and back past the frightening dog and no skinned knees, no wobbling, no toppling. The little kid in me is all about “Why should I practice in order to be a mediocre violinist?” This feels almost intolerable. And there’s strategy: if there is something I would be great at and something that all the work in the world would only make me mediocre at, shouldn’t my energy go into the one and not the other? I’m like the Russians x-raying the hips of potential gymnasts to see who is put together with the native flexibility to be a great gymnast, in order to appropriately invest time and energy in THEIR training, rather than some other. I flirt with this discipline or that, wondering if I’m not supposed to be great at something.

But now I argue with myself as if I were one of my children. We do not practice each day for the sake of some future career, we practice each day for the sake of this day’s practicing, and if by some freak roller skating accident one of the darlings were to lose all of the fingers on his left hand this afternoon, I wouldn’t see the time we have spent practicing as wasted. Furthermore, every great practitioner was once a mediocre practitioner, once a beginner.

But another argument occurs to me today, about the trickiness of judging oneself (or discerning, Dana?) However high the plateau one is on, there is no practitioner who has reached perfection. And it’s like math. Infinity minus two is the same as infinity minus nine hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine. The person striving at her seventh appreciable plateau is at the same time closer and as far from some Monolithic Perfect Practice of the Discipline as the child who has just made the struggling leap to the first appreciable plateau.

It just occurs to me that what humility means to me here is a sort of longing for the Discipline’s perfect expressionso  that one puts forth one’s best effort with a sort of detachment and longing to keep struggling and even though it’s never going to get all the way and it’s not futile, or if it’s futile, the futility is beside the point, it’s the longing of the lover for the Beloved who loves the Beloved for the Beloved’s sake and not his own.