I'm in between practicing routines. For years I've been following one self-designed routine or another, and for the last month or so, I'm not.
Coming up with a new routine has become both a reality check and an identity check.
Identity check: Do I really want to be the musician I'm imagining? Have I thought it through? Am I being practical without being fearful? Have I kept the aspirations and gotten rid of the pipe dreams? Am I aiming high but not too high?
Reality check: Once I settle on that musician: Can I get there, given the time, energy and attention I have available for practicing? (This kind of time is not just hours in the day; it's also years in a productive live.)
Identity check: Once I can predict how much and what kind of time, effort and attention I think I need to invest, is that the kind of person I want to be?
Reality check: Assuming enough “Yes” answers to get me here, what do I have to do every day, starting today, to get me there?
That's what becomes the practicing routine: What do I do every day, starting today, to get me where I want to go. The last step (back to identity check): am I willing to commit to that routine?
I'll admit, this is way off in the weeds. (It's all very real – just in the weeds.) Normally I just tweak the previous routine to fit what I've learned recently and I'm done. But sometimes I get a little cosmic, and this seems to be one of those times.
Two things (at least) seem to be contributing. One is that lately there seems to be a whole lot more music I want to learn. The job has suddenly gotten a lot bigger. Learning and maintaining all that music takes time, and there's only so much of that (both hours and years.)
The other thing is that because of some vacation time and some scheduling snafus, I got bumped out of my practicing habits. And there has been enough jumbling going on that I'm questioning everything I was doing, and I don't want to start doing it again until I'm more or less done questioning.
This is good. There are all kinds of comfort zones, and one of them is practicing more or less the same way every day. Consistency is good, but so is mixing it up. I guess it's time to mix things up.