Life is, oh so repetitive. How many breaths do we really take every day? Thousands. How many steps do we take? How many movements of jaw and tongue as we speak, argue, and exclaim? Thousands, thousands, thousands. Start thinking about it, and you’ll quickly conclude that it’s not possible to be alive if you don’t agree to a repetitive practice.

If you do any one thing twice, that counts as a repetition. Two or two thousand or two million, it’s all repetition. But two thousand times, with your mind focused on the action: wow. That is repetition! “To strive after, to attack, to rush, to fly!”

To do a thing many times: normal, banal, inevitable. To pay attention to a thing as you repeat it thousands of times: extraordinary. Attention is the mother of meaning. Your repetitive breath becomes meaningful when you pay attention to it. This isn’t free of risks, as you might become terribly self-conscious about ribs, throat, diaphragm, and—and oxygen. You’ll hyperventilate and pass out, guaranteed. Attention is the mother of dyspnea, hyperpnea, and oligopnea.

But I digress. Something doesn’t truly exist until you pay attention to it. And something truly exists when you pay attention to it. The something may be a fictional character, an abstract idea, or a voice in your head. It exists by occupying your psychic territory, and if you remain attentive to it over time, it’ll develop and grow. The monster becomes extremely strong if you think about him again-and-again-and-again. It doesn’t matter if the monster was born in the Maternity of Your Santa Cabeza. It’s a giant.

Repetitive practice creates monsters, for sure. But it also creates marvels.

You look at the face of your own child tens of thousands of times. You see the growing child differently from moment to moment, from year to year. The child is always changing, and so are you. On occasion, or often, or very often, you look without seeing. You may be “looking at your feelings” rather than “looking at the child.” But, all counted, you look at your child’s face for the equivalent of two full years, spread out over eight decades. Thirty thousand psychic snapshots, a repeated practice of unfathomable import (or, as Carl Jung used to say, “ein hellava Ting zu Du.”).

The average museum goer looks at a work of art for less than thirty seconds before moving on. How much information do you gather about something in thirty seconds flat, as opposed to two years spread out over eight decades? Look at the painting for longer; look at it more often; return to the museum or gallery and look at it in the morning and in the afternoon, before you eat and after you eat. The painting doesn’t behave the same when you’re hypoglycemic and when you’re over-caffeinated.

Go back, look again, go back, look again,

look for a while longer, look and stay looking.

An art gallery near my home had a show of paintings by Sean Scully, the great Irish-American artist. I visited it six times, staying between 25 and 40 minutes each time. There were about 18 paintings in the show. Let’s say three hours of visits all counted, 18 paintings, ten minutes per painting. “I looked Sean Scully in the eye. We didn’t blink.”

You don’t have to go to actual museums. You can look at any one thing, one beautiful thing in your home, again and again many times: a book, a rug, a piece of carpentry, the window giving out onto the garden. Or a wall of street art in your neighborhood.

I’m a big fan of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian poet, essayist, and short-story writer. I’ve been reading the same few short stories again and again—I mean, some of his stories I’ve now read thirty or forty times.

The information digs little pathways in your brain, and starts to influence your life and to change it. Symbolically if not biologically, the repeated information becomes embodied—that is, it becomes part of you. You look at a guy walking down the street, and you see his embodied information, the result of his repeated practice. This principle is easy to assess if you limit the observation to something like athletic activity: you see the guy’s biceps, and they bulge, do they ever. But the principle is operative across all fields of existence. The intellectual’s repetitive think-hard practice bulges, too! Does it ever!

Exact repetition of a gesture doesn’t happen often. Some aspect of the gesture is repeated, another aspect is varied. But in our system, this still counts as repetition. No two of my two thousand visits to the Place des Vosges were ever exactly alike, and some visits were remarkably different from the average visit. It doesn’t matter; variety is a fine component of repetitive practice.

Repetitive practice isn’t based on “I should do this,” but on “I want to do this.” Pleasure, integration, paradise. Repeat after me:

Pleasure, integration, paradise.

Pleasure, integration, paradise!

Although envy is incurable, today I’m proposing a cure for it.

Envy is one of the seven capital sins, together with Sneezy, Happy, Grumpy—wait, let’s start again. Envy is one of the seven capital sins, together with Washington, Moscow, Berlin—well, never mind.

Envy is a nasty little psychological habit that has the power to ruin your life. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of envy, then I envy you. So, let me explain: envy is a misdirection of wanting. Envy is “wanting gone bad.” Envy is resenting someone for having something that you don’t have. The something can be an object, a quality, a characteristic, a talent, an achievement. Or good looks, or lots of friends, or sweet-smelling armpits, for instance in babies after their bath.

Minestrone ingredients (as per Jamie Oliver): 1 clove of garlic, 1 red onion, 2 carrots, 2 sticks of celery, 1 courgette, 1 small leek, 1 large potato, 1 x 400 g tin of cannellini beans, 2 rashers of higher-welfare smoked streaky bacon, olive oil, ½ teaspoon dried oregano, 1 fresh bay leaf, 2 x 400 g tins of plum tomatoes, 1 liter organic vegetable stock, 1 large handful of seasonal greens, such as savoy cabbage, curly kale, or chard, 100 g whole-wheat pasta, ½ a bunch of fresh basil (optional), Parmesan cheese.

Envy ingredients (as per The Envy Recipe Book): resentment, ill will, malice, yellow bile, black bile, bitterness, frustration, obsession, daggers, rat poison, anonymous letters using cut-up headlines from a crumpled newspaper, rotten moldy Parmesan cheese years—years!—beyond the sell-by date.

From Catherine Willis’s prodigious creativity.

To explain the cure, I’ll describe a clinical case using myself as a hypothetical infected patient. I’m a devoted art lover, and have been for decades. Museums and galleries, visits to artists’ studios, pilgrimages to the birth places of great artists, books about the creative processes of painters and sculptors, I live for it all. I’m a fan of Klee, Mondrian, Cézanne, Albers; also of Fra Angelico and Caravaggio; also of Morandi, Brancusi, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Mary Frances Judge, Catherine Willis, and a hundred other marvelous inspired and inspiring human beings.

But let’s focus on Sean Scully for a moment. Let’s let Wikipedia introduce him (abridged):

Sean Scully (born 30 June 1945) is an Irish-born American-based artist working as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and photographer. His work is held in museum collections worldwide and he has twice been named a Turner Prize nominee. Scully has also been a lecturer and professor at a number of universities and is highly regarded for his writing and teachings.

Among many other beautiful things (this is me talking now, thank you Wikipedia), among many other beautiful things Scully paints large canvasses of juxtaposed rectangles of varying sizes, creating vibrant territories of colors and shapes that are deeply meaningful to look at.

Recently I took this photo of Scully’s “Wall of Light” sculpture at Château La Coste, a stunning modern-art open-air collection (and winery) in the south of France.

Scully is very successful, you know? He’s, you know, accomplished and probably, almost certainly very well-off (“rich”), you know? His 2006 show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York was, like, so amazing it made me feel like I was, like, a single hair on the skull of a bald gnat, you know? Scully can do a lot of things that I can’t do and will never be able to do, you know? The only way I could feel better about myself would be for Sean Scully to fail. Like, Scully = Skull; Scully is a bald gnat. I’ll never forget his 2006 Met show, or his 1996 show at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Scully won’t let me forget Scully.

If I were to envy Scully, I’d wish him ill; I’d use my thoughts of him to diminish myself; I wouldn’t “see” his work, I’d only see the difference between the vast scale of his accomplishments and of his life, and the not-so-vast scale of my own life. I’d eat rotten moldy Parmesan for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The cure for envy is to look away from someone’s success, accomplishments, fame, and riches, and instead to look at his or her human qualities and artistic processes; to look away from externals and toward internals; to look away from “where someone else is” and instead to ponder “where you are yourself, and where you want to go, and how you’re going to get there.” Then Sean Scully becomes a source not of envy but of motivation; he becomes your guide, teacher, and friend.

I’m using the words “Sean Scully” to mean anyone who’s accomplished and successful, right? A symbol of a phenomenon, so to speak. I’ve never met Scully and I don’t know how the flesh-and-bones guy really thinks. But it doesn’t change the gist of my argument.

Attitude
Sean Scully is curious about the world, and also about art and human psychology, and also politics and history. To the extent that I can, I’m going to read, study, watch, study, read, and also watch and study. In my free time I’ll read, study, watch, pay attention, and absorb, digest, and integrate information. And I’ll do it not out of duty but out of curiosity, because life itself is endlessly fascinating.
Commitment
Sean Scully works hard and works well. To the extent that I can, I’m going to get out of bed committed to my work day, committed to tasks, committed to processes, committed to step-by-step procedures, committed to the enjoyment of handling my materials and playing with them. I think it was Somerset Maugham (another terribly prolific creative individual) who said that “a change of work is the best rest.” No, wait, it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who said it. Maybe it was Plato. Or perhaps the Entity Preceding Plato.
Skill
Sean Scully is very skillful. To the extent that I can, day by day, moment by moment, I’m going to improve my skills through practice, repetition, trial-and-error, thinking and doing, feeling and doing, exploring and doing. And practicing, did I mention practicing?
Growth
Sean Scully learns and grows. Before he could paint, he couldn’t paint; before he could sculpt, he couldn’t sculpt; before he could make an omelet, he couldn’t make an omelet. I’ll start by making an omelet, and I’ll go from there. I probably have another thirty years left in this life to learn and grow, to the extent that I can. If I haven’t learned all I want to learn by the time I die, I’ll just reincarnate and start again. As long as I don’t reincarnate as a bald gnat, I’ll be okay.

Ah, I was forgetting: fame and riches. They don’t matter.

I visited Google Translate and I did a back-and-forth, translating a snippet from English to Latin, then the resulting snippet back to English, and so on for a few rounds until Google sent me a cease-and-desist order.