Practice has been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve written quite a bit about the time and effort I’m giving many of my lifelong hobbies, all at once. That means I set aside time to read a certain number of pages each day (which varies based on my workload — but is never less than 80 pages.) It also means that I write at least one of these essays, watch a movie I’ve never seen before, work out at F45, practice the guitar and work on a song — each day, every day.

I’m doing this because I’m trying to break a lifelong habit of obsessively focusing on one hobby at a time. But I’ve discovered a weakness in my new spread-out approach. Even though I picked up the guitar relatively late in life, I was able to make quite a bit of progress on it because I practiced it obsessively over several years. But then I switched to the bass and during the pandemic stopped playing entirely. When I went to restart my musical journey this summer, I discovered that my muscle memory was gone entirely.

It’s a strange thing to experience, because I’ve lost none of my music theory knowledge or my ear for important aspects of music. My rhythm is mostly there. I know where all the chord shapes are, they just don’t fall under my fingers naturally. Slowly, I’m starting to get it back, but it’s a very gradual process, much less dramatic than the process of learning the first time, because I’m not devoting as much practice time.

This has spilled over to my songwriting efforts, because each week in class I have to share what I’ve written that week and my playing is atrocious, far worse than anyone in class. I have to power through the embarrassment and accept it, and hope that my play smooths out in time.

But that too is a form of practice — being able to experience discomfort in public situations and handle it with poise. I had a dream last night where an absurd number of things went wrong all at once — I was in Paris, basically the world capital of the faux pas — and I put myself in an awkward social situation, had my credit card not only declined, but declared canceled. Someone then stole a credit card and rented a car with it that was causing damage. The wait staff at the Parisian restaurant was personally insulting me as I searched for a new card to pay. But the weird part of the dream is that my character within in the dream was taking all of it in stride, not freaking out about any of it, finding it all kind of normal.

It almost felt like my unconscious telling me that I’m not anxious enough these days, that I’m rolling too easily with the riptides of life.

(I’ll also toss in that I had a very strange meeting at work today, but I’m going to keep those details private.)

So, Montaigne introduced this subject, but then immediately diverted to how its impossible to practice for death. But then he went back to the incident mentioned very early in his project about the runaway horse, and gives many more details about that frightening incident. He speaks of being unconscious and how, in a way, that is practice for life’s final moments. But he doesn’t seem sure of that — he’s mostly drawn to the strange experience of it all.

Which I think is the right way to view those kinds of things, with odd curiosity. It’s like trying to predict the next thought in our heads — you basically can’t do it. Thoughts enter our consciousness not by design, but through a stream of thought that comes … where? Nobody knows.

It is very common for people to have repetitive or even obsessive thoughts and focus intensely on why you are thinking about some work anxiety or about a person you’ve tried so hard to get out of your head. But the truth is, nothing you are doing is making those thoughts reappear. They are just as much the product of the mysterious flow of consciousness as the thoughts that allow you to write the next sentence. You wouldn’t want to lose the capability to form sentences, so maybe you also shouldn’t try to turn off thoughts about a person you stigmatize yourself for thinking about.

We can keep our minds busy with a dozen hobbies and checklist tasks, but we cannot stop them from wandering where they like. Yes, I know there are mindful practice that can help quiet our minds and those are valuable.

But whether we learn those types of practices or not, we shouldn’t stigmatize ourselves for what fills the empty space — at least not until neuroscience definitively discovers why those thoughts, and all thoughts, even exist.