The Discipline of Repetition

I am not a man given to repetition.

It's a weakness I've always had, this inability to stick to a task time and time again.  My mind tends to work like that of a butterfly, stopping at the flowers of knowledge here and there, flitting back and forth to whatever it finds interesting at the moment.  In a sense I'm the ultimate intellectual jackdaw, my mind always moving to the newest shiny object that it sees.

The difficulty I have found with this approach is that while it allows one to be somewhat knowledgeable about a great many things, it scarcely lends itself to a deeper knowledge or greater ability to do anything.  The missing component - the one I too often dread - is repetition.  Most of us know it instead as that word dressed in overalls, practice.

Practice can be the bane of those who love the novel, the new, because practice dwells on that which has already been learned.  It's repeating the lesson of today - or even yesterday.  To the mind that seeks stimulation and novelty, repeating that which has been done is at best boring and at worst...well, quite boring.  The perception of learning seems buried beneath the dull drone of doing what has been done.

But over the past year, I've come to see the purpose - if not the joy - in repetition, in practice. 

It's not specifically that one develops greater skills in the doing, although that is an outcome.  What has surprised me most is that as I keep at something - running, writing, iaido - I find that there are interesting mental changes that are occurring in my head far beyond just the task at hand.

By doing, by repeating, by practicing, I am gaining a power over myself.  I am gaining the power to demonstrate that my mind controls my body, that I have the ability to force myself to do something I would rather - given my intellectual bent - avoid doing at all. 

It started with this blog in 2008.  Once I committed to it after 3 years of having it, I started to make myself write every day.  I'm quite sure all of those writing were the caliber I'd like, but I kept to it.  Suddenly, that discipline allowed me to begin to write other things as well.  The idea of writing every day was not longer a frightening or burdensome concept - in fact, it reached the point that a day not writing is a odd one.

That extended to iaido- and here, the martial arts are a fine example.  90% of them is the practice you perform away from the dojo:  we go to the dojo to learn, but it's away from the dojo that we practice and perfect.  One never learns new techniques outside of the teacher; one simply practices what one has learned.

And now my running.  Am I perfect?  Not at all.  But more and more I find my mind making my body carry on with the actions of getting ready to run - and once that was accomplished, getting ready to run farther and farther.

The thing that surprises me is the applicability of the lesson.  I had not thought making myself write every day would lead to making me a better swordsman and runner.

But it appears that this is the true gift of the discipline of repetition, the gift my teachers have tried to teach me over the years:  it is only in the throes of repetition that we master not only the skills we are practicing, but the skill of mastering ourselves.