Commitment

Thinking about what commitment means.

Commitment is essential to practicing. Commitment gets you through the rough spots, the boring spots, the spots when you just don't feel like it, the confusing spots, the spots where you're actually moving backwards, the spots where you can't believe you haven't learned this already, the spots where you look at people who are younger than you by many years playing things that you will never be able to understand, much less play.

You commit to things that exist at different levels. At the highest level, you commit to your vision. Your vision defines who you want to be as a result of your practicing. Your vision is your clearest expression to yourself of why you're doing all this work. The more specific this is, the better, and the easier to commit to.

A level down, you commit to your schedule - “This is exactly when and for how long I'm practicing this week.” If you can't commit to this, nothing else matters. Nobody gets good by practicing only when they feel like it. You can slow down the decline in your playing skills that way, but you can't improve.

Another level down: you commit to your plan for each practicing session. What are you working on today, and how are you working on it today?

Last level down: you commit to playing each note as well as you can possibly play it. This is where you get into the molecules of tone and timing. This is where you deal with one of the few parts of the mechanism you have direct control over: how you move. What are my fingertips doing? What are my wrists doing? What is my body telling me? If I couldn't hear myself, would I still be able to tell I was getting this right?

I don't know if any one of these commitments is more important than the others, or harder to sustain. You need them all.

But in a good practicing session, that last one comes up a lot.