“Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.”
― Donald Justice
When I first started practicing kendo several years ago, whenever I would meet with Japanese sensei, they would ask: “Why did you begin doing kendo?” Being a foreigner, the answer was always easy: I like Japanese culture, history, food, etc. Recently, I heard a a different question: “Why do you still practice kendo?” My first reply, which I thought was quite funny, was “Because samurai never quit.” Seriously, though, I find this to be a much harder question than the first one, just like sustaining motivation for practice is more difficult than obtaining it initially.
I think this is true with any activity that you have been doing for many years and that has become a big part of your life. You do it “seriously”, as people would call it. Dan Heller even introduced a gradation of levels of seriousness with which amateurs pursue their activities (it was photography in his case): beginner photographer, serious photographer, insanely serious photographer,.. After a while, you begin to realize just how large the part of your life that you are devoting to your activity of choice (photography, kendo, ) really is. It takes a lot of time, money, mental and emotional resources. Becoming any good requires both quality and quantity of practice. I am not saying that the benefits are not worth it, but whatever you invest into the activity does add up, both in the positive and in the negative sense.
You might wonder, “Just imagine how much time I would have if I quit that thing that I have been doing”. Wo-o-o-o… it’s a very un-samurai-like thought, but after all, some of us are also scientists or at least (think that) they like logic, so let’s think it through.
First of all, you might not have to “quit” per se to be able to claw back some time and mental resources. You might be able to dial down the amount of practice, because your experience should enable you to maximize the quality of practice during the remaining sessions. The returns on increasing the amount of naive practice, to borrow the term from Anders Ericsson, are rapidly diminishing anyway, so you might as well replace it with deliberate practice.
Second, even if you quit a highly structured practice regime that has been incorporated into your routine over the years, you might not be able to immediately reclaim all the freed-up time in an efficient manner. For example, when I have a looming deadline on a work-related project and decide to skip a kendo practice in order to get some of the work done, I typically find that the uninterrupted chunk of time that is typically devoted to kendo becomes fragmented by interruptions (usually, procrastination that manifests itself in one form or another) that exist because a routine for alternative work has not been established. So unless you are prepared to quit something for good or at least for a substantial period of time (like taking a six-months sabbatical from your usual activities, which would allow you to genuinely try something new and to make a new habit of it), it is actually not worth doing if your goal is to free up time for other projects.
