That's what they say. And even if it doesn't make perfect, it can't help but make better.
But I'm a really bad practicer. Maybe part of it is impatience: being the smart person that I am, I expect things to come to me immediately, all at once (as though I'm one of the characters in "The Matrix" who simply needs to be plugged into a loading program!). And part of it is probably boredom - doing the same thing over, and over, and over drives me up the wall. Another self-imposed difficulty is that I make practicing out to be a bigger deal than it really is. I imagine practicing anything is a task that will take at least 45 minutes to an hour of my time, and it's entirely too easy to blow that off in the currents of busy, busy days.
Yet without practice and the development and improvement it brings, the consequences looks more undesirable: stagnation, or emptiness. Stagnation, because failure to improve means one stays ever in the same place. Emptiness, because perhaps to avoid staying in the same place one might jump ever from one thing to the next, without taking the time to absorb and embody what's valuable.
Perhaps the first step is to seriously admit my humility and own it authentically. I don't put this first because I think it's most important, but because it answers my first reluctance to practice being that I think (or rather: wishfully think!) I should be smart enough to not need it. Okay, I know I'm no Einstein, but three things have made me even more conscious that I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer: learning guitar, learning Kuk Sool, and learning yoga. I might be able to describe what the fingering for a chord looks like, or the steps in a form, or the alignment for a warrior 2. But getting the right parts of my body to properly go where they're supposed to is another thing entirely! And although in my cerebral university days I'd have dismissed it, these days I'd say the body's ability to perform well is a kind of knowing. My snobbish intellectualism has gotten its comeuppance, and without flagellating myself, I should just own up to the fact that it takes more work for me to learn than I would like to admit, and get on with it.
I'll go to the last problem area next, because I think in mulling it over there lies as least a partial response to my middle problem area. I set myself up for failure to practice because I make it out to be a big deal: as though I have to practice for an hour or two, and with too many other things to do, there's no way I can practice, too. And I've gotten an answer to this difficulty from my Kuk Sool and yoga teachers, and I've heard it come out from interviews I've listened to with writers and musicians, and maybe I've not trusted them or taken it seriously enough (ooo - maybe this even taps into my over-estimating my intelligence! I just love connections!). And the answer is: practice just a little bit. 5 minutes. 10 minutes. 15 minutes. Maybe I won't work through everything I'd ideally like, but it's better than nothing.
And not "it's better than nothing" in the sense that it's practically like doing nothing, but just a little bit more. That's a defeatist way of looking at it, where if better than nothing is so infinitesimal, then it's not really worth doing. But I think it was Julianne who I heard (or overheard? Hmm, suddenly the whole word-coupling to make for catching the phenomenon of "overhearing" strikes me as peculiar. Is there underhearing?) one evening say that the little bit a person practices for 5 minutes per day, can have a beneficial effect elsewhere. For example, a person might work on forward bends to loosen up the hamstrings, and she might later find she can do a better triangle because the loosened hamstrings let her pivot down further in the hip joint. (apologies to Julianne in case she reads this and I'm erroneously connecting together different asanas!) So: pick something about the activity in question - guitar, writing, a new language, whatever - that you like, and commit to practicing it for just 5 minutes. It might grow into more, but it doesn't have to, and even if it's five minutes, it is important.
And lastly, my obstacle in thinking that practice is repetitive and boring. Here, I again think I'm totally setting myself up for failure to practice. Who says practice is boring? Whose practice is it, anyway? If I'm in charge of it, and if it's boring, then isn't that my own damned fault?! Of course it is. And it's not as repetitive as my lazy self would make it out to be. No two times of working through a song are the same, and (hopefully) as my ability, say, to finger and fret improve, each iteration of a song is an opportunity to be better at what I like to do. Every book I read in my area of research makes me more well-grounded, and better able to draw connections. For every five minutes (or 55) of struggling to write a paragraph of text, I have something there to work from the next time I sit down to try and create something new. And improving at what one likes is to do isn't boring - odds are quite good that if I give myself at least a mandatory five minutes, that I'll find I'm enjoying myself so much it can easily grow into more.
So here's to at least 5 minutes of practicing pigeon per day!
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