On time, and an Interview with Movement Practice Paris

When I was playing capoeira many years ago while working at a coffee shop, during my 15 minute breaks and longer lunch breaks I would go to the back parking lot to practice. Between school classes, same thing. Didn't matter where I was, or how odd I seemed juxtaposed against the backdrop of dumpsters, asphalt, etc.

In my masters, I would wake up long before internship began, put my mattress up for some space, and train in my room. During lunch breaks at internship, I would practice the work Ido had begun sharing in the blog. After classes, I would go to capoeira class. To maximize time, I ate in the bus/train my long-since-cold tofurkey and pasta from a tiny tuperware (yes, EVERY fucking night).

The pattern repeated itself in my phd, and elsewhere besides.

It has been a long time since every aspect of my life became unified around one thing - practice (and also since I ate tofurkey). So I briefly forgot these moments. It was only in this recent interview (in French) with Alain (of Movement Practice Paris), when we discussed how people deal with lack of time, that I recalled these to give them as examples of managing time.

Alain asked me what a person with 10 minutes in the day should focus on, what would be most important to practice. My answer was this - stillness practice. Because from there, the agitations and disturbances that otherwise disorient you the rest of your day settle a bit, and you begin to see where your own actions actually created blockages and leakages (including subtle choices and habits that prevent you from pursuing the things that matter to you). This is something that has become most evident to me after studying the work of the psychoanalyst Kourosh Dini who has talked about engaging work in ways that have been very influential for me.

And now, I ride the bus, and it’s a moment to work on my eyes. The time between engagements of the day is not sacrificed to the god of scrolling, but to practices of emotional intelligence and other personal projects - whether reading old entries or examining posture or playing with somatics... (and sometimes semantics). Hell, even writing a post... it's all practice.

So is it possible to make practice central in your life, when you have other things going on? Yes, of course it is. It’s about prioritization. Maybe it was easier in the era prior to social media, but I think not - my peers were busy talking or smoking cigarettes or eating to pass the time, long before Facebook (or even myspace), but I had no such interest.