On progress and getting better
Oh, hi friends!
When I got a bike last October, the guy working at the shop (the excellent Ride Brooklyn in Park Slope) asked me to sit on the bike so he’d know how high to adjust the seat.
So I sat. The tips of my toes barely touched the ground. I was wobbly. Things felt unstable. But apparently that’s how you’re supposed to ride; your legs should be fully extended each time you pedal.
“You’ll get used to it,” he said.
Honestly, I could barely get on or off.
“Soon you’ll be swinging your leg over the seat and pedaling off,” he said. “It’ll be second nature.”
Sure, I thought. That’s about as likely as my legs growing six inches.
Then one ride, two rides, a hundred rides later…
I noticed yesterday I was swinging my leg over the seat and pedaling off. When I stopped, I could put my toes down. Things felt steady.
That’s what happens with practice. With the long game. With doing the work, again and again, without self-judgment, without praise, without constantly checking to see how far you’ve traveled from the beginning.
If I measured my progress by that first ride, I never would have gotten on the bike again.
But you keep showing up.
You keep learning.
Until, finally — hopefully — you wobble a little less than before.
“The writer has two kinds of faith: actual writing and sitting openly. Have faith in your personal effort or sweat. And faith in God, or whatever you want to call it. Then the voices will come. Faith is the big deal.”
From the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, in this 2006 New Yorker profile.
A Case for Documenting Your Work
What does your early work say about your work today?
Here is one track “Vänta” by 22-year-old jazz wunderkind Micah Thomas, who’s finishing up his master’s at Juilliard. Full album released June 19.
From this New York Review of Books piece: “When he returns to Juilliard, he hopes to continue his work with the trio, but he also told me: ‘I’m not set on anything, or on a particular format. I’m more in a finding mode.’ Tide brilliantly documents what he and his trio ‘found’ on a single night in March 2019. ‘This whole album,’ he says, ‘is just some of my first good writing.’” (Thanks to culture vulture Mr. Macdonald for sending!)
I hope you can dig up some of your "first good" writing/painting/pottery/gardening memories today.
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara