The daily practice
Small things, tended on purpose, every day
The daily practice is maintaining and attending to the small things: everyday, intentional choices to care for what I have, tend the ground, plant seeds, and let them grow. Said another way, in another domain, it is writing the notes on the staff. Some days, played together, they’re an atonal mess; some days a chord. Each note is a seed, or the water, or the sun: a single component, nothing more. Given time, patience, practice, and refinement, a symphony, or a garden that feeds more than me.
The notes on the staff
The practices I keep
None of these is impressive on its own. That’s the point. Each is a single note, small enough to play on a bad day, and the music is what they do together over a season.
Most mornings
The compost turn
Three to five minutes with a fork, when the pile needs it. Once a batch is fully cooked and only waiting to be spread, it doesn’t. So even this is an exercise in reading: what is the compost doing, and what does it want today? Some mornings the answer is nothing, and doing nothing on purpose is still the practice.
Weekdays
Twenty minutes on the mat
The first note of the day. Breath, the slow opener, the form, a few minutes of footwork on the taped grid. Capped, with a floor. The martial arts are one practice among these, and the source of the three rules below.
In season
The garden
Clearing sod a strip at a time, laying paths, feeding the pile, amending the soil, and then, for a whole winter, doing nothing but letting a tarp and some lime work. Planting seeds and letting them grow is a practice too. The garden has its own page.
One line
The log
One row in a plain file after a session, written by the bell when it can be, by hand when it must. The record is the water. It asks for nothing except that it not be skipped.
Sundays
A letter
One letter a week, drafted, argued with, read line by line, released Sunday morning. And under it, twice a week, a scene for the book. The writing is a practice before it is a product.
Evenings
A few rows
The needles, a few rows, no count. The one practice where nothing is measured and nothing is due, kept so that the others stay practices and don’t become a program.
One of the practices, in detail
The mat: twenty minutes, capped, with a floor
I train in a small martial arts school in Knoxville, one night a week, under a teacher who has spent his life in the art. The school calls itself a self-awareness art first, “for the student to get to know themselves,” before it says anything about fighting, and that order is why it belongs on this page. Monday through Friday, before anything else, I go out to the garage where the mats are. Two minutes of even breathing in a standing posture. A few minutes of slow movement from the neck down to the feet, because the feet are where the footwork begins. Ten minutes of the tai chi form, as much of it as I’ve been taught, slow and breath-paced. Then the last few minutes on a grid taped to the floor: one footwork pattern and one small chunk of striking, the same material every day for two weeks, easy reps first and committed reps last. Twenty minutes is the cap. There are no bonus rounds.
Two decisions hold it together. The order in which it shrinks on a short morning is decided in advance: the form drops first, the strikes shrink second, the breathing and the stretch never drop. And there is a floor for the bad season: two minutes of breath and one line in the log. That is the whole assignment on the worst day. No make-up work, no penance. The return costs nothing, which is the only reason it happens.
The material is the school’s, given in the order the school teaches it. The scaffolding around it (the cap, the drop order, the floor) is mine, built with a coach, and it exists because the previous version of me kept building practices that could only survive a good month.
Three rules, off the mat
A fighting system whose first rule is not to be in the fight
Three of the school’s primary rules, in the order it teaches them, credited as taught. What each one does to an ordinary week is my own extension, not a teaching of the art.
Rule one
Don’t be there
On the mat: the first move is not to be where the strike lands. Off it: most of the fights I lose are with myself, before breakfast, in a courtroom I convened. Rule one says I don’t have to attend. Declining the trial is not the same as refusing to look at the hard thing. The bill, the grief, the missed day all stay. Only the verdict goes.
Rule two
Move the target
On the mat: you are the target, so reposition instead of standing there trading blows. Off it: when the week is hitting me, the useful question is rarely how to hit back harder. It’s where to stand so that I can act. A shorter morning, an earlier night, one honest meal. Move to a base you can work from, then work.
Rule three
Defend the line
On the mat: guard what is load-bearing and let the rest go. Off it: the courtroom drags in everything to keep me fighting. Most of it isn’t mine to defend. The line is the few things that keep a life in true, and the discipline is knowing which few, and leaving the rest undefended on purpose.
Two images I borrowed
The oak that grows both ways, and the trellis
My teacher’s recurring picture is an oak. It grows up into branches and leaves, and at the same time down into roots, and it cannot do the first without the second. The taller the canopy, the deeper the roots have to go, or the tree comes down. The school also says, plainly, that the student is the center of the system. Put those together and you get how I’ve come to hold every area on the Now page: what looks like reaching is held up by rooting. The visible progress is paid for underground, in the boring daily returning nobody sees. The image is his; what I’ve done with it is mine.
The second image came from a book. A rule of life is a trellis: the structure a climbing plant grows on so it climbs somewhere instead of sprawling on the ground. A trellis is something you grow on. A cage is something you’re measured against. Nearly the same wood, opposite function. The daily practice is the trellis. The moment I start reading it as a test, it’s become the cage, and the fix is not a better trellis. It’s to stop grading. A vine knocked off its frame owes it no apology; it climbs again from where it is.
The principles I keep
How the path gets walked
I used to keep a set of five engineering pillars. They were a decent place to start, and “five” was arbitrary. These are what survived the letters. Offered, not assigned.
One
Start with compassion
Toward my own body first, then toward everyone else. Not as the soft option: kindness is the faster road back. Contempt has never once made a tired body less tired or a slipped day less slipped. Compassion is what lets the reading start.
Two
Employ words. Don’t just use them.
Select them and put them to work. A word is chosen, not spent, and it can cut in a friendly conversation as surely as in a hard one. Carelessness with language is a strike thrown without looking where it lands. Care with it is the same discipline as care on the mat.
Three
Be there on purpose
You become what you attend to. Attention is the one thing that is entirely mine to place, so I try to place it deliberately: on this day, this rep, this person, and not on the someday or the tally. Intentionality is the whole of what a daily practice asks.
Four
Read; don’t sentence
A board out of true is information, not a verdict. When something in my life is racked, the carpenter’s question is what pulled it, not who is guilty. Read it, bring it back toward true, or build with the way it moved. The judge is not just unkind. The judge is ineffective.
Five
Scale to the season
A practice survives by shrinking, not by holding its size. In the rich season, the full hour; in the brutal one, two minutes and a line in the log. The thin version is not a failure of the practice. It is the practice, kept, until the season turns.
Credit where it’s due
The martial art on this page is Serbatik, taught by Maha Guru Jerry McCleary through the International Serbatik Federation, and everything here that belongs to the school is credited as taught: the three rules above and their order, the school’s description of itself as a self-awareness art, the student as the center of the system, and the oak that grows both ways. What I’ve done with those ideas outside the training hall (the courtroom, the seasons, the principles above) is my own extension and should not be read as a teaching of the art. The trellis comes from John Mark Comer’s Practicing the Way, and behind it the Rule of St. Benedict. My teacher has not reviewed this page; any error in how the school is described is mine. The school’s own site is serbatik.net.