I saw a quote from Bruce Lee recently, my man Bruce Lee.   “I do not fear the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks.  I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”  Dig it.

My father could have been woken from a sound sleep, been urged to put on a suit and rush over to the funeral home.  On the trip, even if the place was close by, he could compose a eulogy in his head to make the mourners cry, then laugh, then cry again.   It was a talent he had, something he must have given a lot of thought to at some point.   I saw his notes for a eulogy, five or six words on the back of an envelope.

He was not a professional eulogist, if there is such a job, but he was a very, very good one.   

His example may not be the best one for our purposes here, because it was somewhat innate in his case.    I am thinking of the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.   If I sometimes spent ten hours straight playing the guitar, it was not to improve my playing, it was because I couldn’t stop.  And because I couldn’t stop my fingers got more and more warmed up, I stumbled on new possibilities, parts, voicings for chords, ways to strike the strings.  So love of the thing made me improve, because the playing was  so much fun for me.  The discoveries were an organic part of how much I love to play.  Same with drawing.

This blahg is a kicking board set up in front of my cottage in dreamland.  I come out each day into the fog and kick the board once, softly but with great focus.  I stand and breathe in the cool, wet air.  I kick the board again, harder.  Then I kick it again.  After a while I am kicking the living shit out of the board, smiling as I recall Bruce Lee’s smirked rejoinder to O’Hara, the evil bully, breaking a board in front of Bruce’s face before their fight at Evil Han’s tournament.   “Boards don’t hit back,” says Bruce Lee curtly before bashing O’Hara directly in the scar on his cheek inflicted by Bruce’s father the day his sister committed suicide after fighting off O’Hara and his lecherous bully friends.

Boards don’t hit back.   But if you hit a board correctly a few thousand times you get the hang of it in a way that people who kick things randomly have no hope of ever kicking.