On Frustration, Practice, and Awareness (aka Escape from the Hypercube)

A common sentiment - frustration when the thing that worked yesterday, doesn’t work today. By all logic, I should be better… and yet, the same approach that brings me from point A to point B in the past may bring me up against a wall today.

In the movies Cube and Hypercube, a group of people must escape from a building. However, the rooms of the building change and reorient in 3 planes (and four, in hypercube) every time they move (imagine trying to escape a transdimensional Rubiks cube).

Plot twist - each room kills the subjects, always in a different manner.

The path is never as straightforward as it seems. This characterizes a real practice - you can’t fall asleep with your foot on the pedal… We aren’t interested in a process which invites somnolence; life is too short to be doing things half checked out. I’d rather play inside the hypercube of practice; here I can learn and practice to be “awake” - at the very least, so I can be awake at the moment of my death.

Every day we wake up, and we try again. The challenge shifts, slightly, playing that game, dancing that dance. The frustrations come. Baruch Hashem. Movement practice is an antidote to the grooves of routine.

Every day, the mind begins to predict the task, to defer to what worked yesterday. That’s what the mind does, to be fair - it conserves effort. Summoning the impression, recalling it, clarifying it, is strenuous psychic work…

But if something is straining to overcome the mind… what’s that thing? This, the hardest of the soft problems, the softest of the hard problems…a movement practice helps to reveal.

Be like the hero in cube - stay on your toes, keep thinking, and don’t die.