It doesn't just happen.
I grew up in a home with a mom who was a professional violinist. I woke in the mornings not to an alarm clock, but to repeated intervals, resonating from the living room below. Many times in the middle of the night, I could hear mom practicing in the bathroom with the vent fan on, in an attempt to muffle the sound. We came home from school, walking through the front door, mostly unnoticed, because she was still at it, not just playing music, but practicing every note and every passage, even those she had played and performed innumerable times before.
She did not just know the notes or memorize them. Indeed, by that time, my three brothers and I were also able to call to mind the complexities of the melody and the rhythmically ordered results. It was like a scratched record playing the same few measures, over and over again. Even now, so many decades later, when I hear a particular piece of music, I remember those notes coming up through the floorboards.
"Have you not practiced that enough already?" we would ask her. I realize now, absolutely not. "It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me," wrote Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Even Mozart practiced. That should tell us a lot.
But mom did not see it as practicing. She was engraving not just the notes, but the syntax into her brain and fingers and heart that she would be able to repeat on command the very life, beauty, sense and glory to those black notes on the page. The mechanical repetition of notes perfectly played does not move the soul, but immersing in the unfathomable depths of music.
Even legendary musicians know, no matter how extraordinarily talented they may be, that a goldmine of practice goes into what they do. Influential musician and remarkable jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong once noted, "If I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, the critics know it. If I don't practice for three days, the public knows it."
Practice changes us.
The other day, I listened and watched my grandson practice his piano lesson. Over and over he played the notes, readjusting his hand position, stumbling a bit in parts, rushing through the familiar as a ten year old is apt to do. He was perhaps reluctantly going over the lesson, but practicing nonetheless. He could have thought about what he needed to do for his next lesson, he could have worried about it, or made excuses, or even panicked, but we learn to do the work by doing the work.
We are not all musicians, but we are all practicing something. It just matters what. We choose daily --even momentarily-- what skills, endurance and character we are working on. Or not working on.
Practice predicts how we respond and what we do. Not just with our hands, but with our hearts. We approach people, situations, difficulties, the catastrophic and the ordinary differently because we have practiced. What kind of person do I want to be?
Whatever is true,
whatever is honorable,
whatever is just,
whatever is pure,
whatever is lovely,
whatever is commendable,
if there is any excellence,
if there is anything worthy of praise,
think about these things.
What you have learned
and received
and heard
and seen in me --
practice these things,
and the God of peace will be with you.
Philippians 4. 8-9
