My husband and I took a trip recently. Even though I’m a nervous flier, I was looking forward to being on the planes. Flying is a block of time during which, if you don’t have work to do, you’re actually supposed to do things that might not make it into a typical busy day at home. Nap. Read a book for hours. Watch a movie—heck, two movies, back-to-back. And you get to have snacks!
On our flight home, I got out my sketchbook and began drawing our friends’ dog Martha (above). The man in the seat next to me, who’d been working on his laptop, glanced over. “Did you just do that?” he said, indicating my drawing. I said yes, and he said, “That’s a talent. I wish I could do that.”
“You could,” I said. “It just takes practice.” He shrugged that off. “I don’t have the talent,” he said. “It’s not about that,” I insisted. “Do something consistently, whatever it is, you get better at it.” He gave me a polite smile and went back to his work. At the time, I thought, Too bad, I could’ve given him a big inspiring speech about how you don’t start out being good at something, you get there, over time. Or, as Patanjali wrote in Sutra 1.14:
Practice becomes firmly grounded when well attended to for a long time, without break, and in all earnestness.
As I think about that story about the man on the plane now, I realize he taught me a lot more than I could’ve told him.
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