Practices are

Practices (at least for this blog) are:

 

-personal rituals:  

-exemplified well by those already posted on this blog: Read a few on the main page if you are curious.

-acts or activities done with agency + intention: Think about the differences between rituals, routines, and habits. Rituals are activities that you are in control of, you choose to do them and are careful or mindful about them; habits, on the other hand, are activities that you are probably not in control of and probably not careful or mindful about them–unless you are trying to stop them. Consider how a personal practice might begin as a ritual but in the doing of it, becomes less purposive and more monotonous; in this case, the initial intention and personal agency has turned into something else, and the ritual has become (merely) routine. Something that started out as a personal practice could even become an inflexible or paralyzing personal rule that is more in control of you, than you are of it. This blog takes personal practices to be those activities you choose to do in your own way for your own purposes. This is still a generous and broad definition, but the point is that personal practices are activities that you are in control of, not the other way around.

-intrinsically motivated:  Because they are personal, they originate from the person, not from without. It seems entirely possible that a person, if put in a situation where s/he is forced to perform an act, may reappropriate the meaning of that act and internalize the motivation for doing it. 

-sometimes described with the simple formula: When I _____ I (like to) _____. For example, a friend of mine said that when he is writing a lot, he likes to take four or five showers a day.

-creative//expressive: Because the practices are personal, they are probably invented and expressive of something about the person that performs them.

-inherently idiosyncratic: They are personal and therefore idiosyncratic. If examined, they are curious and quite fascinating to others; potentially quite meaningful to ourselves.

The above attempt at clarifying what this blog means by “personal practices” was made in good faith (i.e. without any intent to hoodwink or proselytize) and with a complete awareness that issues such as agency or intrinsic v. extrinsic motivation are philosophically, not to mention practically, ambiguous territory and subjects of much titillating debate.

That being said, some positive clarification was necessary in order to communicate the aims of this project.

Moreover, one explicit aim of this project is to: examine the topic of practice in a personal realm, and so reexamination of, comments on, discord with, anxiety about and laudatory compliments for the way the “practice project” is currently built are highly encouraged. Make your voice heard below.