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? It’s good 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.
The topic of habits is an interesting one and there is plenty to read about it (e.g. the book Atomic Habits by James Clear).
Something that can be effective in helping us establish a new habit is to link it to our identity through conscious decision, such as saying to ourselves ‘I am a cellist’ or ‘I am a life-long practitioner of cello playing’ or ‘Cello playing is a part of my life’.
Also, it can be a good idea to start small in order to get into the habit of showing up. For example, I could get my cello out, tune and play some open strings for 5 minutes every day at 7pm. After a week I could make it 10 minutes every day.
For others it’s more of a boost to start big. 1 hour every morning at 7:30. Just to pick an example.
It can also be very helpful to combine cello practice with a habit that we have already established. Say, if I have a habit of brushing my teeth every evening I could try to schedule my cello practice to be the last thing I do before brushing my teeth. Or if I have a habit of spending some time in the morning with my coffee before I start working, I could try to make it a coffee + cello time.
And I should mention that cello practice can be different things. It can be to read a piece of sheet music without playing it, to practice only the rhythms with an ‘air bow’, to close ones eyes and mentally play ones piece, or to make some sound with the bow on the string through improvisation or technique training or repertoire learning. It could even be to go for a walk while listening to cello music (or any kind of music for that matter) or listen to a podcast where a cellist is being interviewed, or a podcast on your favorite composer…
Happy practicing!
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.
