Is our cello practice sporadic or is it a daily habit?

It can be good to be aware of it - is my cello practice sporadic or is it a daily habit? I like to reflect on this for a minute just in order to check if I’m in balance or in a constant conflict internally.

• If I’m happy with my practice being sporadic, and my practice indeed is sporadic, then there is balance. Peace of mind.

• If I’m happy with my practice being a habit, and my practice indeed is a habit, then there is also balance.

• However, if I’m happy with it being sporadic but I’m actually trying to force it to become a habit, then I’m in conflict with myself.

• And similarly, if I’m happy with my practice to be a habit but it’s actually sporadic, I’ll also feel an inner conflict - a feeling of being inadequate.

If I’m not careful, I can go for days and weeks with this inner conflict without being aware of it. The heavy energy from it will weigh me down.

The point is to make a change that brings us that peace of mind. Or did you start to play the cello because you want an even longer to-do list and more stress in your everyday life? No, we want to alleviate stress with our practice, not add more.

So we need to make a change, either by changing our preference for practice routine (habit vs sporadic) or by changing how our practice matches the routine.

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My practice has been sporadic for a good while, and I’ve had to accept that that’s the way my practice looks like these days with my current schedule and priorities. But I have a desire for it to change and to become a daily habit again, like it has been before. In order to make this happen I need to sit down with my planner and to actually decide how this habit looks like in reality, to write down my practice times in my planner and make sure it’ll happen again and again until it’s the new normal. But until then, my peace of mind is maintained by accepting the current circumstances.

tl;dr

We want to be happy. If our practice routine doesn’t make us happy we need to either change the way we want our routine to be, or to change the routine that we currently have.