27 April

Me practising guitar about 40 years ago. The key to mastery of something is to practice so much that it becomes habitual, and then innovation can arise from that automatic set of habits. In my life more generally, I’ve realised this is also why I mostly dislike travel. Ordinary life is my favourite thing. Routine. The routine of ordinary everyday life is ‘practising’ life. Allowing it to become habitual. Only from that can something meaningfully new and magical emerge. Travel is endless distraction. Living at the surface of things, ‘seeing the sights’. It’s not life lived deeply. It’s like giving a kid a guitar who’s never played and asking them to improvise with a master. Asian culture gets this, the focus on the ordinary, the mundane. Extracting ‘events’ from it, novelty and surprise, through that long habitual apprenticeship in the ordinary.