Practice

Practice

Facias ipse quod faciamus suades.  (Practice what you preach.)

Titus Maccius Plautus (200 BCE)

Do not let your deeds belie your words, lest when you speak in church someone may say to himself, “Why do you not practice what you preach?”

St. Jerome (400CE)

There is the world of ideas and the world of practice…neither is to be suppressed.

Matthew Arnold (1840)

One of the great difficulties in the new order of thought is that we are likely to indulge in too much theory and too little practice.

Ernest Holmes (1927)

Apparently great minds really do think alike.

There’s an old adage that “Practice makes perfect” and even a casual glance at many great lives does seem to prove the verity of that phrase.  Edison made hundreds of bulbs that didn’t work before he finally did en-lighten the world.  Lincoln lost several elections before he became President.  Sometimes you just gotta learn what you don’t know before you can prove what you do.  That takes practice.

In order to be, do or have anything we wish to be, do or have, we must practice being, doing or having that.

As much in warning as in instruction, Epictetus (c 100) wrote: Whatever you would make habitual, practice it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practice it, but accustom yourself to something else.

Why settle for being something else when it is just as easy to practice what we wish to become?  If we wish to experience a different reality then we must practice a different way of being in the world.  We must come off of automatic and become aware of how our words and actions betray that which we would claim for ourselves – and change. That which we wish to create, demonstrate, or replicate in our lives must become our daily practice.

Let us really begin to practice that which we preach as gospel (good news) so that we have a good deal more good news to share.

We are all learning.  Keep practicing.