Most of us know far more about how we want to live than we actually manage to live.
That was certainly true for me.
What am I going to do now? my mind raced. How am I going to do this?
I sat on the twin bed in the small guest room of a monastery. The room was Spartan: painted concrete-block walls, a bed, a desk, and a small bathroom. Nothing more than I needed.
I had come there carrying a much bigger question.
How was I going to take all these things I had learned and actually create a different kind of life?
It felt as though I had tried everything and failed at everything. I had tried to stop drinking. I had tried exercising. I had attended church more faithfully, read more books, taken up hobbies, made resolutions. None of it seemed to last.
Part of me began romanticizing the monks.
How nice, I thought, to withdraw from the world and live a simple spiritual life where things came easier. No boss aggravating you. No people offending you. No endless anxiety. Just prayer, quiet, and God.
Then I picked up the little brochure the monastery had left in the room.
It contained some history of the monastery, suggestions for making the most of a retreat, meal times, and the daily schedule of the monks.
That schedule caught my attention.
Prayer. Work. Prayer. Work. Prayer again.
Services throughout the day, beginning before most people were awake and continuing into the evening.
And suddenly my romantic picture of monastic life began to fall apart.
I became grateful that I could sleep through the night.
I imagined having my workday repeatedly interrupted for prayer—not only the time spent in the service itself, but stopping what I was doing, walking there, gathering with the community, and then returning to work.
And then there was another thought.
How would I like to live with the same group of people—not for a weekend, a month, or even a few years, but potentially for the rest of my life?
Maybe the monks had not escaped ordinary human irritation after all.
Maybe they carried it with them.
The personalities. The disagreements. The boredom. The frustration. The days when prayer felt meaningful and the days when it probably did not.
Something shifted in me.
I began to feel a deep kinship with them.
Certainly, there were enormous differences between their lives and mine. Marriage, property, work, family, money—the structures of our lives were very different.
But underneath those differences was something I understood.
They practiced.
Every day.
They returned to the same things again and again.
Prayer. Silence. Work. Community. Attention.
Whether they felt like it or not.
And sitting there in that plain little room, it occurred to me that perhaps this was how change actually happened.
Not through one great realization.
Not through finally discovering the perfect book, therapist, retreat, prayer, or spiritual idea.
Through practice.
Repeated practice.
Think about a baseball hitter.
I have watched countless games and still marvel at how quickly a hitter must decide whether to swing. A pitch can arrive at the plate in less than half a second. Somehow the hitter has to recognize the pitch, decide whether to swing, and then put the bat in the right place at almost exactly the right moment.
How can anyone do that?
The answer is actually pretty simple.
They have done it thousands and thousands of times.
It starts years earlier—in backyards, parks, ball fields, batting cages, and little leagues. Swing after swing. Season after season. Year after year.
And even the very best still strike out.
That may be the part worth remembering.
Practice does not mean we stop failing.
It means failure is no longer proof that the practice is not working.
I still strike out too.
I still get angry. I still become anxious. I still cling to things. I still get caught in my own thinking. I still forget everything I thought I had learned.
But perhaps the goal was never perfection.
Perhaps the goal is simply to practice enough that, little by little, something begins to change.
To notice sooner.
To let go a little faster.
To return a little more easily.
To be just a little more awake today than I was yesterday.
That monastery taught me something I had not expected.
Peace was not something the monks had found by escaping life.
It was something they practiced in the middle of it.
And maybe that is what the spiritual life asks of the rest of us too.
Not that we get everything right.
Not that we never strike out.
But that we keep returning to the plate.
We notice. We adjust. We practice.
And when the next pitch comes—
we take another swing.