Stream2

Anyone who’s taken an open ended practice seriously knows how hard it can be to make progress. As a piano player who specializes in improvisation, sometimes I feel like I can learn a hundred new details of how to play without really improving the overall sound. Similarly in writing and meditation, I feel like I can go in circles endlessly, and even learn a lot of stuff along the way, without really getting anywhere.

There’s something nice about more well-defined problems like in software engineering where there’s a clear goal and problem that can be solved concretely.

However obviously there is a huge amount of room to expand and improve in open-ended practices, and this article is about sharing a method that has worked well for me recently.

The crux of the method is to go into an exploration phase, and then to come out of it by consolidating some or all of what is learned in the exploration. Once I’ve consolidated material like this, it’s like I’ve reached a new baseline, one that I can then kick off from in my next round of exploration.

In order to effectively explore I need a starting point that feels right. Here are some examples: beginning improvisations on the piano with the B minor chord. Beginning free form writing with the prompt “What can I get into now?”. Meditating on trying to understand how enlightenment works.

My starting points need to be really concrete, like the examples above. They need to be something where I’m fully committed to going through the process that follows from the starting point. If I don’t have a starting point then a prior exploration could be in order, but that’s not the topic of this article.

Finding a starting point that I want to begin from is a feat in itself, but it’s also the road to greater heights. When starting out at something it can feel like no matter how much time is put into it no progress is made – thinking back to my days of writing one page a day on whatever topic felt right. This is the value of a starting point, it keeps me focused. If I’m digging into the same prompt every day, I’ll be digging into the same corpus of material, and I’m more likely to make progress.

The way that the process of exploration work is this: I start at my starting point and do my absolute best to make absolute progress, and I do this over and over and over again. Even if I feel like I’m repeating myself (which I do a lot). Eventually something wonderful can happen: I arrive at an idea that feels fully formed. It’s like the prompt goes full circle. Back to my examples: my B minor improvisation turns into a chord progression that I like. My prompt what can I get into turns into learning a new form. My meditation into enlightenment results in an insight that I remember.

I think a key element in my process is following my intuition. If I feel like writing, it’s not simply because I enjoy it, but it’s because there’s something that my mind is trying to get at. There’s some unknown idea waiting to be discovered.