"Practising intervenes in the direst moments, when we feel like we have nothing and no-one", writes Antonia Pont
Photo by Matt Ridley on Unsplash
In the human framework that structures much of A/UK’s work—that of “I-We-World”—we make a lot of room for techniques of personal exploration and mastery, at the “I” level. The taxonomy we use on the site is the term “practice”.
By which we mean those methods, rituals and movements which generate your inner resources for the battles ahead, particularly as we face the out-of-balance systems that we live in.
We’re interested in any practice that works—spiritual or secular, meditative or artistic or otherwise. So it was a delight to come across the rich, intellectual yet funny writings of Australia’s Antonia Pont, who is about to bring out a book titled A Philosophy of Practising on Edinburgh University Press (pretty expensive, but you can ask your library to order in).
Antonia wants us to distinguish “practising” from “practice”, because she has in mind (and shaped by her yoga) some clear criteria for practising. From her book:
Structural form: There is a set of behaviours, a form of doings/activity or ‘a practice’ of some kind, ideally benign for the practitioner and others.
Intentional repetition: This practice (which tends also to involve repeated sub-activities) is intentionally repeated at regular intervals over time.
Relaxation: The repetition is performed with a minimum of effort without compromising the form of the practice.
Repeating repetition: The repetition eclipses the doer and even the content of the practice, becoming itself the ‘content’ – doing-the-practice slips into sheer practising.
In a witty and generous 2021 essay for the literary website LitHub, titled Private Practice: Toward a Philosophy of Just Sitting, Antonia doesn’t just give a very good account of why “Just Sitting” is as good (if not better) than meditation, but also of what she means by practising herself:
Practicing—and here I mean sitting (but all the kinds count)—intervenes in the direst moments, when we have nothing and no one, or feel like we have nothing and no one.
Neoliberalism is hard. Relationality is treacherous and fraught. Authority is often capricious and carelessly or intentionally cruel. Class fallout is horrifying and pervasive. Illness is excoriating. Envy wracks and paralyses us. Financial instability is terrifying, exhausting, and the precariat is our New and Nasty Normal. People we love are mortal.
Our time on this planet is looking more and more curtailed. Cultural genocide, while contested, is still everywhere and dogged. Discrimination awaits you (it’s only a matter of time). We’re neurotic (on the whole) and our bodies are impermanent … okay, I’ll stop now.
Of course, it involves building a set of skills, and eventually it can turn into some kind of accomplishment. One becomes very impressive on a skate ramp, or can make an oboe sing, or can cultivate flourishing plants in exhausted soil; one can cook as an elite sport or know the intricacies of Indian Classical Dance.
But let’s be clear, a practice is something that (when you can manage to do it) may help you to pause wanting to top yourself, today, now, for a little while, and which—in itself and as its activity—doesn’t harm you either.
So, drugs (the illegal and the pharmaceutical, and depending on quantity), and compulsive entertainments, and the violence of over-work, and that kind of stuff, aren’t really practices. They are something else, and not the topic of this essay.
Practices (of the kind I mean here) need to be benign enough, and complex enough, so that you can keep doing them, plumbing their depths, finding more to find, while not getting harmed in the process. That’s what I’ve discovered this far in.
…A while ago, I played around with an alternative definition—to the usual “financial” one—of impoverishment. My sense is that not having a practice that you can do sometimes is what real poverty looks like.
The point of practicing, too, becomes with time more and more immaterial. (You start it, say… to reduce cholesterol; you keep going because you want to see the face of god.) Practicing shifts how you think about what matters.
And the strengthening and steadying effect of practising, too, is why those who would dominate you or your fellows always get straight on with diluting or forbidding the personal or shared cultural practices (including language), of whomever they’re trying to conquer or disassemble.
It’s not about whether you have a nice house, several automobiles, or a fat share portfolio of Fossil Fuel companies. Impoverishment, as I’m defining it here, can feature at every level of the socio-economic ladder. It can exist at the very top and, in these cases, you get very bad decision making; you get a certain kind of heartless, brutal and grinding capitalism; you get vulgarity, greed and you get unwisdom.
(Practice can feature in the most economically-squeezed of lives. Learning it can be expensive. Doing it doesn’t have to be too expensive. In the film Searching for Sugar Man, the family are very poor, but Rodriguez knew to take his kids to free exhibitions at art galleries. He knew how to make music, make poetry, and he passed this on.)
Because the thing about having a practice—which might be Sitting Still, or something else entirely—is that you “need” a whole lot less, or your “needs” are re-paradigmed (often you cease to believe in them at all). Confusingly, those of the so-called upper classes are in some cases less “impoverished” (my definition) because their expensive schooling, or stable or open-minded home life (if only…), introduced them to various kinds of practices—art, sport, music etc.
Lucky them. Nice practices like playing an orchestral instrument, classical ballet, road cycling, snowboarding, sailing and so on. (Quite pricey practices—requiring gear—but practices, nevertheless.)
Yup. The kinds of practices we like to have may be classed; this is utterly true. But despite this ickier aspect, the basic thing remains the same: we can hope to have practices. There are endless practices existing beyond these snooty ones. Life is crappier when we don’t have practices. Either we’ve stopped visiting the good-enough ones we had, or we might need to get a new, fresh one and start from scratch.
If you’ve never had one, you’re allowed to get a couple (three is usually too many). Hopefully they’re benign enough, and we do them in our scenes and/or alone, and at different stages of our life. We get absorbed, or we don’t, and we return to them when we thought we’d gotten over them—blind contour drawing, walking early in the morning in silence, sitting around with elders, listening or making something, cooking a meal with your grannie, weeding the garden, goin’ fishin’ (especially if one never actually catches anything).
My father, I realise now, has had a driving practice and a cow-husbandry practice. Neither of these are particularly sustainable. Thus, we also have to shift our practices over time and with a sensitivity to our current predicament. Give some up. Invent new ones and learn commitment to them. (Recently, he’s taken up reading.)
We hold on to their contours and repetitions for dear life, in dire times, when we just don’t know what else to do.
More here from the LitHub essay.
[Note for scholars: Pont has a dialogue going with Difference and Repetition, by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, throughout her book. It’s too much to explain here, other than that practising does indeed involve both “difference” AND “repetition”. That is, your conquer time and open up a new future for yourself, by sticking to the method or the task that you have chosen and love.]