Consistent

On my homepage today:

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
Bernard Berenson US (Lithuanian-born) art critic (1865 - 1959)

True.

And I hadn't thought about that before. When we're raising kids, people tell us to "be consistent" - but the idea is to be what children can trust. Can children trust an immovable, implacable force of nature? Well, sorta ... But what children really trust is trustworthiness. Love. Understanding. Firmness of purpose. --- I don't think I'll ever tell another young mother or father to "be consistent." It conveys a slightly shaded inaccuracy that I don't think I like any more.

And what about practice time with an exercise routine or a musical instrument? I had a student one time whose piano teacher had told her that

"practice does not make perfect - practice make permanent."

Also true.

Becoming more and more inflexibly "consistent" might not be such a good goal. It might be better to develop. Grow. Learn. Change. Enjoy. Love. Release. Breathe.

Yeah.

Breathing would be good.

(Thoughts on a Saturday morning, with one now late paper left to finish, after handing in one really irritating paper on time, at the end of the quarter, after receiving a soldier in boots back from a war zone, and watching the Fellini-esque graduation celebration of our son the Evergreen State student (pictures coming soon), and driving back and forth to Olympia twice in one week, and learning that everything has accelerated all of a sudden and my bookmobile and other training will begin on Monday and I need to have a YA book pitch and a story time picture book to read and a finger play to demonstrate by then, and the cat's been bringing ticks in all week.)