So, I woke up thinking about practice. Just choosing to do a something, over and over again. Like, this morning, at 7 a.m., the kettle’s boiling, and there I am, setting up my camera, pressing the red record button and talking to myself in the kitchen like any other ordinary person in the 21st Century. But seriously, I like making this stuff and regardless of how it turns out, it’s a bit of practice I didn’t do yesterday.
And then I’m also thinking about acceptance, particularly in the process of making stuff. Like, nothing is ever totally right the first time, which I’ve been banging on about forever, but still find it hard to accept. I don’t want to draft stuff and then polish. Just. Don’t. Want. I want authenticity and I revert to believing it has to mean nailing everything in one go or giving up completely. Often, things just come out in the wrong order. They’re in some sort of right order in my head, but that’s a sub-optimal order for telling a story. Editing and switching stuff around isn’t just okay, it’s essential and I’ve had to cultivate my acceptance of that too. And since the camera never lies, I’ve had to accept that I now look like I’m 100 years old.
But acceptance is something that literally “comes with practice”. I have to keep doing the thing—setting up the camera, pressing record, and then gradually coming to ignore my tummy, or the dumb things I say or the number of times I touch my face. And that’s the part I didn’t fully understand until I talked it all through. I knew that practice was important and that acceptance mattered, but I hadn’t realised that practice is what actually leads to acceptance.
That’s what I wanted to say. But it’s not how it came out the first time. I had to write it down and think it through and turn it around. You see, I’m trying to get back in the habit of shooting video of myself and when I came to seeing if I could edit this morning’s ramble into something intelligible I realised I hadn’t noticed how much I’d been touching my face. So I made the video into just a montage of that instead.
Perfect Path 