This wandering through the
wilderness is quite tedious. Especially
during a corona virus pandemic. I have a
suspicion that this pandemic was set up just so that I would be forced to be in
quasi-quarantine and would have no excuse but to devote my full attention to my
Steps studies. Of course, that’s a very
self-centered view and obviously impossible.
Yet these little thoughts pop into my head.
I completed my third
iteration of Steps to Knowledge in March of 2020 and am now heavily ensconced
in the Continuation training. The
lessons are interesting and a bit more intense and holistic. It seemed as if Steps to Knowledge had many
lessons that were granular in focus; dealing with one aspect that required
attention on a particular day. There
were some holistic lessons as well, to be sure.
But Continuation has many holistic lessons (in other words, larger
arenas of thought), plus a regular ‘checking in’ with one’s 4 Pillars. Overall, there is an emphasis on stressing
the need to take the process seriously.
To be a serious student.
Becoming a serious student
is not easy. You sort of have to
restructure your life a bit. The lessons
don’t say anything about needing to do that, of course. It’s just on personal reflection that it
occurs to me a different way of lining up my daily routine might help my Steps studies. Or, from an NLP/reframing point of view, my
current routine could be viewed as being out of synch with the needs Knowledge
has in working to integrate itself into my life. So tweaking things here and there helps to
ameliorate this transition that I am going through. Of course, the journey feels like I’m
wandering the wilderness.
When I was a music student
many years ago I had to learn this lesson as well. I initially studied violin as a youth, then
switched to viola in college. When I was
a young boy I would practice 10 or 15 minutes a week. Of course, you can’t expect a 7 year old to
practice like an adult would. In junior
high school, I managed to increase my practice time to perhaps 15 or 20 minutes
a day. An improvement, to be sure, but
you still couldn’t refer to me as a serious music student. A serious music dilettante, perhaps.
In high school I became a
member of the Miami Youth Orchestra and I found myself surrounded by many
students who were much more accomplished and advanced than I was. In public school orchestras, I was more often
than not the concertmaster of any orchestra I was in. In the youth orchestra, I found myself
sitting 5th chair, Second Violin.
It was very sobering and I found myself practicing 30 to 45 minutes a
day. Just to stay in the ball game and
be able to hold my head up with a modicum of dignity.
When I entered music
school, the whole intensity of practicing was ratcheted up several
notches. I still, initially, could not
be called a serious music student. So it
took several years before I could maintain the focus (in Steps terms, building the
capacity) to practice 3 or 4 hours a day.
At one point, and I don’t remember the year, maybe1971, a kind of
determination took over and I realized I needed to restructure the scheduling
of each day of practicing if I was going to have any hope of improving as a
viola player. I decided I needed a daily
regimen of scales and arpeggios. I
decided on 2 hours before breakfast.
Which meant I needed to get up at the ungodly hour of 6:00 a.m., instead
of getting up any old time.
And since I would be doing
my scales and arpeggios before breakfast every day, breakfast would be my
reward. This is when I gradually
discovered that maintaining a regular reward system for myself would be a good
way to go. So, in addition to breakfast,
I found other ways to reward myself. No
dessert at dinner unless I had practiced my full quota. To this day, at age 67, I still find ways to
use the reward system when I need to get something done.
By restructuring my day a
bit and putting myself on a regular regimen of more serious practice, my
capacity for practicing increased to the point where my regular daily average
practice time was 6 hours a day, a schedule I could not have imagined in high
school. Light practice days might be 4
hours a day, usually when I had rehearsals to go to. On completely open days, I would occasionally
practice 8 hours a day. On one occasion,
I practiced for 10 hours. But that was
more because I wanted to know if I could practice that long. I kind of treated myself as a science
experiment. 10 hours was too long for my
capacity. I had to recover the next day
and was only able to scrape together 1 or 2 hours. So I found 6 hours a day of practicing to be
a good fit for my personal capacity. My
growth as a viola player really took off once I had found a good regimen of
practice that I could I stick to.
So I’m thinking I need to
do the same thing with Steps. I’m not
sure how to translate my music student experience with my Steps student
experience. I think part of it is
consistency. The hourly reminder thing
is still iffy at best. I tried getting
an electronic reminder gadget to put on my wrist. But the instructions were poorly translated
and the device apparently needed to be synchronized with a cell phone, a device
I don’t really use, as of yet. So I do
the best I can with my daily practice.
Also, I do a little reading each day with the numerous books provided by
Marshall and the unseen ones. Especially
‘Wisdom from the Greater Community’, two volumes that are positively awesome in
their scope and content. I work at being
more aware and discerning in my daily interactions with the world at large. Consistency in my daily music practice was
what got me to a point where I was actually able to have some kind of music
career. So perhaps consistency in my
Steps practice will garner results as well.
