Practices aren’t

Practices (at least for this blog) aren’t:

 

-habits//routines: practices seem distinguishable from habits or routines because they include an aspect of intent, and agency.

-private: at least, not necessarily. personal may also mean public.

-training//exercise: training involves practice. “practice makes perfect.” “how do you get to Carnegie Hall? practice practice practice.” practice as training or exercise could be explained by telling what the practice is and why it is done, but the “why” points back to the “what”; e.g. Why do I practice violin for hours every day for seven years? To get better at playing violin. practice as praxis or personal ritual points to something beyond/in addition to the (perfection of the) activity itself. there must be other aspects to practice as training that may include something more than exercising a particular skill or muscle, but to be a personal ritual it seems that some part of it must actually be personal (there must be a reason for doing the thing that is personal). there is nothing about practicing violin every day that is inherently idiosyncratic

-required: practices in the sense of this blog are intrinsically and internally motivated. activities that are required are external to our agency. you may find that you have a personal ritual around doing an activity that you are required to do (such as imagining in full detail crushing your boss’s head underneath the copier lid every time you have to make copies for him/her), but then that ritual is the practice this blog is interested in, not the thing you are required to do (in the above case, the head-crushing fantasy, not the copy-making).

-religious: at least not necessarily so. many people probably have personal rituals that involve the religious or spiritual, and this blog is definitely interested in those. but to be clear (and this is indeed a nebulous and difficult area to try to be clear about), while praying in church, for example, has a “what” and a meaningful “why” about it, it is not inherently personal or personally meaningful. religious practices done by an individual or a community of individuals are simply different kinds of practices (i might argue that they are communal practices and not personal ones) and you should absolutely blog about that somewhere else if you want to. in the case of this blog however, a practice that involves the religious or spiritual will be included if it can be uniquely and individually interpreted and explained as meaningful by, to, and via the person who practices it, not by the religion s/he practices. returning to the case of prayer, this blog will not include posts about why Christian prayer (for example) is valuable for Christians, but it may include posts about why a particular person prays the way she does or what happens to someone else when he gets down on his knees. we’ll see. actually, i think that people might argue that it is in religious practice where the personal/communal/I/Thou categories that i am making kind of break down, but i hope i am clear even if you think i am wrong. let there be debate! (i’ll start another blog on this if you need me to.)