If you ever had music lessons through the Suzuki method, this is a mantra that you are well familiar with.  Dr. Shinichi Suzuki was known for coining this clever saying that made me giggle when I was a kid and makes me scoff now that I'm a teacher.  I mean, I love to eat, but do I love to practice?  Not always.  Actually, I'll be completely honest and say- no way!

It's taken me a long time to figure out how to mentally approach the subject of practicing.  Practicing, I decided a few years ago, is work.  Work is hard and toilsome.  It's not usually fun and games.  When I think of work, I think of people farming the land, typing in a cubicle, or doing any number of things to be a producer of goods or services for society.  I don't usually think of a person sitting in a practice room doing slur exercises all day.  But if you are called to be a musician, this nitty gritty stuff is your work - and the strange thing about it is that the end product won't necessarily be something useful to society or any type of tangible item that one can treat as a commodity. 

The greatest thing about being a musician is that your end product is something beautiful.  But it doesn't happen overnight.  It takes hours of fingering a piece that you are entirely sick of.  It takes waking up early to squeeze in an hour before you go teach so that you can get some technique drills in because you're too tired when you get home.  It takes slow practice, fast practice, mental practice, metronome practice.  It takes recording yourself and playing it back even when it makes you want to vomit to listen to yourself.  All of this is the process of work for us musicians.  For me, it's a battle to sit on my practicing stool every day that I do it because practicing is also a physical activity that is more difficult if you're out of touch with your body.  The stool and the stand for me are like a battle station.  I'm battling my own flesh, and the battle is everywhere.  I struggle to train my fingers into controlled, precise movements, keep my posture correct and my spine straight, create an internal pulse of the music within me, and somehow channel musical expression into all of it in the process. 

So the next time you struggle with practicing, just think: this is your work.  Don't think of it in terms of how much you are making or not making for all the hours or preparation you do for one gig or concert.  If artists allowed money to be a motivator of productivity, we would never get anywhere.  Instead, remind yourself that you were wonderfully and fearfully created in God's image (Ps. 139:14) and that everything you say on your instrument is individual, important, and can make another human being experience beauty - and that, my fellow musician, is priceless.