Holiday Practice Boxes

Friends, it might be all about the practice boxes.

Even though I preach the value of practice boxes all day every day to reluctant piano students under my care, I hesitate to admit that it might be that simple. That if we just figured out the particular practice boxes that made up our lives and day after day after day worked to fill them in, things would go better. It wouldn’t solve our problems, certainly, but might make them a bit more manageable, a bit less overwhelming and scary.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, because well, November.

And now that I think about it, also October. I can’t remember for sure, but also possibly September. And August.

Even the kids are talking about the mysterious passage of time these days. “Miss Amy!” they wail as we are writing the lesson date in their practice notebooks “How can it be December already?”

I have no idea.

This has been a fall without weekends. Or rather there were weekends, but they were all full of musical work of one kind or another. Either Matt was orchestrating some production with a cast of thousands, or I was herding small children into various configurations of classes or recitals, or I was playing with colleagues in programs here and there and everywhere. It happens. It will happen again. We signed up for this when we decided to be musicians so many years ago. Perhaps it is bad form to complain that this whole crazy scheme of ours is working.

But lately my mind has started to melt like a Surrealist painting. I can’t hang onto my to-do lists; they slip through my fingers like water. The clocks are threating to fall right off the canvas. Time is shapeless. To quote a favorite Sondheim song: I stand in the middle of the floor. Not going left. Not going right.

And that’s on my best day.

Last week ten-year-old Lila and I were discussing practice boxes. Or rather, we were discussing empty practice boxes. “If you are alive, you fill out your practice boxes,” I said. “Wow,” she said. “That’s intense.”

Who needs a spiritual teacher when you have children in your life nudging you in the right direction? And if I’m paying any attention at all, there are plenty of lessons to be learned even in the most intense season. December with all of its madness is itself a guru of sorts, because practice boxes are everywhere this time of year. We just have to remember to look for them.

“We put up our Christmas tree last night,” Ellie told me last Wednesday. She is eight-year-old and a talker. I don’t have to ask my predictable “What’s new?” to engage this child. Every lesson she is ready with her weekly report.

“We put up our Christmas tree and there are lights, but no ornaments. In my family, we always put on the ornaments on Christmas Eve. It’s our tradition,” she told me.

This is fascinating to me. In a culture where we too often rush the season, where we worship at the altar of instant gratification, here’s evidence of restraint, anticipation, patience. I love this. I want to hear more.

“So, in your family you wait all month to put on the ornaments?”

“Yes. It’s our family tradition.”

And then from the sunroom I heard her father say, “Wow. I have never heard of this family tradition.”

Holiday practices are sacred, even if we have to invent them on the fly. Specifically, holiday traditions around décor speak loudly about our practices. In the days before Thanksgiving, I was startled to see so many Christmas trees sparkling behind my neighbors’ windows. “Since when did we eat Thanksgiving dinner in the presence of a Christmas tree?” I asked Matt one night after coming back from my evening walk.

The following week I was having drinks with a friend. We were talking about the holidays: what we were choosing to take on this year, what we were letting go of this time around, our December to-do lists that were exploding exponentially like an out-of-control experiment multiplying in a forgotten petri dish. I had draped the dried cranberry garlands up on the mantle but was giving myself a pass on planting small evergreen trees in pots outside my sunroom door. I had a date for the Christmas Studio Tea but hadn’t yet sent out announcements. I was fighting to see my way through the maze of three weeks of December lessons before the winter break, final studio classes, choral concerts, Sugar Plums.

But even as we were talking what I was really thinking about was Advent practices, my chance every year to set an intention for the month that pushes back against the hustle and craziness of the season. I’ve been wondering how a musician might infuse some silence into her life or what fasting might look like in this month of feasting. I want to hold some space to sit with some questions that have been pinging around my mind for a while now. I long to carve out some austerity and simplicity in my everyday rituals and rhythms. I’d love to take a deep dive into some yoga practices, or at the very least, my closets.

But these thoughts were too unformed, too vague to give voice to them, the practice boxes not yet created or even imagined. Instead, what I said out loud was I had written our holiday letter but lacked stamps and envelopes. Lisa replied that she had a card ready to go at the printers but was leaving town for a week. “There is no way these will be out by Christmas,” she said. “You know, there are the 12 days of Christmas,” I reminded her, and myself. “We could intentionally slow down the expectations and frenetic pace here.” There’s an Advent practice, I thought, grasping at an idea of time that might just have room to expand and breath.

I continue to need the reminder that this could be possible. Just like I need the reminder that it’s all about those life-saving practice boxes of structure and intention, discipline and accountability. Christmas letters are a practice box this month. So are my evening walks to view lights and cozy domestic scenes in my neighborhood. I doubt if I will watch any old holiday movies, but my pop-up Christmas books are on the bookshelf in the sunroom. Christmas teas with former students have their own boxes, as do the five Nutcrackers I play and the Lessons and Carols services I sing. In the midst of all the glitter and tinsel, I still need to put in my time on the yoga mat, the meditation cushion, the piano bench. There are laps to be swum and cats to feed, plants to water, meals to cook. It’s intense to be sure, but if we are alive, it’s all practice.