Rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal

A thought occurred to me this morning as I walked to work: many of the efforts and exertions we do in life are a lot like rehearsing for a play. Since coming back from Japan, it’s really motivated me to try and study harder. I could see the progress I made so far since my last trip. So, I dusted off the kanji flashcards I used sparingly before, and got into a habit of running them through every morning. This came after some really good advice from folks after my last post about learning Kanji.

So, each morning, I try to run through a subset of the kanji cards I have, separating them into piles of cards I got right, and cards I got wrong. I don’t get flustered if I fail. I sleep on it, and try again the next morning. It’s like a rehearsal. If I mess up my lines, I just go through it again until I get it right.*

But it also occurred to me that in following the moral precepts of Buddhism, if you treat them like rehearsals, then you don’t have that nagging feeling if you fail. Instead, just relax, figure out where you messed up and run through the rehearsal again then and there, or start again first thing tomorrow. Eventually, you get it all right on the first shot. If you practice mindfulness trainings, this too makes sense. If you screw up, just relax, and rehearse again until you get it right.

If a person rehearses Shakespeare enough, eventually they’ll get it right, no matter who they are. So why should we stress and compare ourselves to some other person, or to expected results. Just keep rehearsing.

Namu Amida Butsu
Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu

* – It does work, by the way. But after only one week it’s still just short-term memorization, which can get lost over time. It still takes many more “rehearsals”, and more exposure to the language to really ingrain it in your mind. Like I said before, it just takes flight time.