One of the drawbacks of working without a plan is that it can be easy to lose sight of what it is you’re trying to accomplish.  You put your head down to finish something that seems both urgent and important, and when you finally come back up for air and take a look around, you discover you are miles away from where you thought you wanted to be.

Something like that has happened to me over the last few months.  An opportunity presented itself, and I set myself an agenda to prove myself worthy of the opportunity.  Part of that agenda included a daily essay written for a particular person associated with that opportunity, and in the process of doing that, I lost sight of writing for this blog.  I apologize to my readers for that.

Regardless of what happens with the opportunity, both writing and practice are going to be big parts of my life.  I want to continue reading and writing about practice, as well as actually doing the practice every day.

Once you stop doing a practice, it can be very hard to get started again.  It’s all about inertia.  Once a body moves in a certain direction, it will continue in that direction until a force is exerted to stop it.  If you’re trying to push a large box across a floor, it’s much easier to do once the box is actually moving than it is while the box is at rest.

So it is with our habits.  It’s much easier to keep a good habit going when you’re doing it every day.  The longer the interval between practices, the harder it will be to keep the practice going.  And if you wait long enough, it will be as though you never practiced at all.

Use it or lose it.