A rule about tension and work
No amount of work with tension will increase capacity without tension. Similarly, no amount of increasing painful range of motion will increase painless range of motion.
Podkatchka in a Nutshell
We generally go through 2 cycles of strength work per season. This winter 2022, both cycles put an emphasis on the podkatchka, a conditioning circuit we learned about from our teacher Ido Portal.
The goal is not direct skill development, so much as building work capacity, so that when we shift in Spring 2023, there is a solid foundation for subsequent development.
Practice is human development
Practice is synonymous with human development. As a distinct concept, it gives us a space to sanctify and formalize processes of transformation.
To transform would imply a process of change. But how can I change from A to B, if I’m not B? (Setting aside considerations of physis vs poiesis). There’s this unbridgeable gap, going from zero to one. So we get Zeno’s paradox of the motionless arrow, proof that we could never change.
Such proof exists in the abstract; it’s in the concrete, away from the words, that a bridge is revealed.
Conceptualization is just a scaffold, collective knowledge, supporting those endeavors along the way, but what produces development, lasting transformation, is practice.
Practice and Procrastination
One of the prescribed antidotes to procrastination is to realize you might die tomorrow, or fall off the wagon.
But then, why would you even bother starting today?
If we were accumulating skills and attributes, there’d be no sense in pursuing that accumulation.
But with practice, something else is developed… and various cultures built around practices have recognized that this imminent potential of death increases urgency of practice (for example, to be ready at the liminal moment).
This is true of any practice, anything cultivating human development. It matters (in spite, and because, of this impermanence), unlike the skills accumulated. The skills and such are containers for that practice, they are fodder for that development.
“Memento mori“ might make some things less urgent (the skills), some things more urgent (the development) - yet often they might look very similar, if we fail to understand that where one stands in relation to what one does changes everything