Again, and again

How important is determined repetition?

How important is determined repetition!

Heard a feature on 'The Story' (an American Public Media radio show) the other evening about a singer-songwriter who calls himself Paleo and who spent an entire year in 2006-7 driving about the U.S., playing occasional shows - and writing, recording, and then uploading a new song every single day.

The results are - well, you can be the judge. But the underlying spirit, I think, is notable and worth remarking on. So much of life, and so much of accomplishment, seems to rest on simple, concerted, sustained effort. Woody Allen may have been right, in other words, in claiming that 80% of life is merely showing up - but with the understood qualifier that one has to show up again, and again, and again. And, thankfully, there seems to be something in most of us that leads us to do exactly that, in many ways. I'm thinking partly of the hundred trips to the gym that result in a strength and an energy greater than one could acquire through one prodigious visit. Or of a colleague's recent candid admission that after two years of studying Mandarin he has come to the conclusion that fluency lies about five years of hard study away - and that he'll be going to China this spring to begin those five years.

But most of all, of course, I'm thinking of Cleo. Unfamiliar with Woody Allen, or Paleo, or the word repetition, she nonetheless sits down, every day, with a book, or several books, and slowly learns the places, and colors, and names of the objects scattered across the pages. Car, yellow, roof, elevator... over weeks, and weeks, the results of her investment surface. And now a little girl who, at this time last year, couldn't even crawl stands up, walks to a book, lifts it, and carries it to me, to read again.