practice

Things come to my mind now and then.  Thoughts or ideas, sometimes dreams, memories, songs or food ...  you get the idea.  The sorts of things that usually hang out in the background, like the hum of the refrigerator, unnoticed until the end of the day when everything else is quiet.  When I finally hear them they are so loud that I have to address them.

So this is how I came to realize that I have been thinking about practice.  Not the kind of "practice makes perfect" that is about doing something over and over again until you get it right, but instead the practice of doing something over and over again just because. The practice that is intrinsically about the commitment to the act or routine, to its own end.  If I look at more clouds, I see more clouds.  It is not about a new cloud, a different cloud, the best cloud ... it's simply about seeing clouds, nothing more, nothing less.  With each attention, each pause, I am a thicker catalog of observations and experiences to which each addition is as essential as a breath.  And there is no one perfect breath.  Each is vital.