NBA star Allen Iverson was the star player of the Philadelphia 76ers, and during the 2006 season word got out that he had missed practice.
He was asked about it by the media, and over the course of two minutes he went on a rant in which he mentioned the word practice 22 times. If you’re a fan of the show “Ted Lasso,” you’ll recognize it, because it was parodied on an episode in the first season.
Now while I was a big sports fan growing up, I wasn’t much of an athlete. The place practice came up most in my life was instrumental music. (I played the tuba. I was also a music major in college.) The principles of a musician and an athlete are pretty similar: Focus on the fundamentals, go through your routines, build from the simple to the complex, make sure you’re taking care of your own business before you start worrying about whether other people on the team (or in the orchestra) are taking care of theirs.
Like so many kids and adults, I had a love-hate—okay, mostly a hate-hate—relationship with practice. I couldn’t wait to be done doing my warmup exercises and playing my scales so I could get on to playing real music. I was talented, and talent can get you a certain distance, so sometimes I would rely on my talent. But, like lots of talented athletes or musical performers, I learned that will only get you so far. Far more often, the people who do best are the people who put in the work, the people who play their scales and hit the gym. The people who show up and hustle at practice.
Funny enough, we talk about practice on this show a lot. Like, all the time. But we’re not talking about drills on the basketball court or scales on the tuba, the way Iverson talks about it. Not exactly, anyway. Because what Iverson is driving at is the distinction between practice and a real game—one of them counts, and one of them doesn’t. On one level, that’s true: we practice being mindful on low-stakes items like drinking your coffee or taking a breath so that we’ll be mindful when the stakes are higher—a major ethical decision, a life-or-death choice. But on another level, in Jewish life, there’s not really a distinction between practice and game time—because it’s always game time. Everything counts. Every moment counts. So the kind of practice we’re talking about isn’t so much in the sense that practice is different from performance.
What I think we really mean by practice is more like the ancient Greek word it’s derived from, praktikos, which is about doing something as opposed to merely thinking about it. Practice as in practical, rather than just theoretical. The point of saying that something is a practice is to do it, not just talk about it. Lilmod v’laasot, to study and to do, as we might say in Hebrew. Or na’aseh v’nishmah, we will do it—we will practice it, and we’ll also seek to understand it, as the ancient Israelites said when they received the Torah at Mount Sinai.
Over the last seven episodes, we explored a bunch of regular, pretty mundane practices: daily rituals for things like waking up, going to the bathroom, putting on clothes, eating, working, entering and leaving a space, and going to bed. None of these are earth-shattering events. They are things we do every day—not the kinds of things we typically think of as game time performances.
But the reason I think they’re so important—the reason I wanted to devote seven episodes to them—is that, like any kind of discipline, in order to manifest a change in your life, you actually have to do it, and do it regularly. And because we do these things every day, these are practices that can really help us bring about a positive change in our lives.
So by way of concluding the miniseries, I want to offer one last practice—the practice of making it stick. It’s not enough just to have the intention to be more mindful when we’re eating or tying our shoes. If we really want to make a change, we have to be accountable for our intentions. And there are two ways I know of that can really help to do that.
The first is to use a habit tracker. This can be something on paper or on an app. The key is to write down a few practices you really want to work on this week or this month: Saying Modeh Ani when you wake up every day, or eating one phone-free, mindful meal each day. Write it down, and then, before you go to bed each night, make a check mark for that day to indicate whether you did the thing. You’ll be accountable to yourself.
Another way is to make social media your friend. Announce on your favorite platform that you’ve got this intention—to kiss the mezuzah before you come in the house every day for the next week, or to take a mini-Shabbat break midday at work. And again, each day, share how you did on doing the practice. Your friends can help you be accountable to yourself.
In Judaism we call this kind of thing heshbon hanefesh, a kind of personal spiritual accounting. In the business world or in our personal finances, an accountant’s audit helps us see the truth about how we did at living out our intentions. The same things is true here. A spiritual accounting helps us stay honest and accountable—and hopefully can help these daily practices to stick.
Blessings for the journey. Know that I’m on it with you.