Practice
You can always tell when somebody is a practitioner. It doesn’t have to be a Zen practitioner or a musician. It can be somebody who does a certain profession, whether it’s weaving, or anything. You can tell if they have practice about it. Or take a mechanic, an old fashioned mechanic, where you drive your car in. He starts it up and says, “Oh, the timing is off.” Everything about the car is internalized. The sound of it, the feel of it. He’ll be able to tell something about an old-fashioned car, just from practice.
There’s a part of practice that I think is inherent in all different practices. The type of concentration, the familiarity, the intimacy that you get to whatever you [are] practicing, whether it’s archery or Zen or music or how to make a perfect pancake. You won’t get there unless you get intimate with the subject, and if you become… The more intimate you become you only get there through practice and as you become more intimate you know more about it, where you can say “This batter is too liquid or too solid or too warm too cold. It’ll act this way,” and all that comes only through practice and I think it [often] comes up in conversations with my friends about, how people go about life these days, that they’re really not willing to practice anything. ~ Ottmar Liebert
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