Practice of Constancy
Dialogue with the Real
Introduction
Human beings seek to give meaning to their lives. They want to endure, to feel that the passing of days unfolds as more than mere habit. They display their birthdays on social networks so that others will think to wish them well. They follow TV series that prolong fiction when reality runs out; they sign up for a sports club, convinced of a new beginning, then gradually lose their regularity, crushed by the rhythm of the world. Behind these gestures lies a fear: the barely veiled threat of their being’s insignificance when faced with a world that moves according to its own momentum.
In daily life, we are not only scattered; we endure reality as a succession of facts. Things occur, follow one another, contradict each other. Nothing connects, nothing organizes. Existence unfolds without form, without an inner axis to give it coherence. Bergson reminded us that life can only be understood in duration — that inner continuity which links moments and gives them meaning. Where that duration is lost, everything either freezes or collapses. The world is sometimes absurd, its paradoxes leave us speechless. The mind, focused on personal life, has become impervious to the poetry of the world — a poetry erased by violent events that brutally remind us of the fragility of existence.
Such emptiness demands a structure; it draws the individual toward a truth that might save them, submitting their will to the opinion of others. Where one no longer manages to live with uncertainty, one asks for a solidified, codified, ready-made reality. One demands answers, frameworks, turnkey methods. This need for coherence then turns into dependence: the human being no longer seeks to understand but to be guided, organized, reassured. Hannah Arendt had already seen this temptation — that of replacing the living durability of the world with the artificial stability of systems.
To escape this paralysis, another form of fidelity is required. Kierkegaard called it repetition: to begin again, but consciously. Nietzsche made it the measure of freedom: to say yes to the world even in its repetition. Simone Weil saw in it pure attention, and Zhuangzi, the rightness of a gesture attuned to the flow. In all these visions, constancy is not rigidity; it is the breath that keeps life open without letting it unravel.
This text begins there — with the absence of inner structure, with the need for a connecting axis. It seeks how constancy can become that axis, not as a fixed rule but as a breath: a way of inhabiting reality without fleeing from it, of bearing its density without losing oneself within it.
The path toward constancy cannot be decreed. It passes through stages: repetition that shapes, habit that stabilizes, practice that engages. It crosses routine that threatens, method that clarifies, second nature that frees. It culminates in passion that intensifies. Each stage reveals a way of inhabiting time, a manner of transforming continuity into presence. This text follows that path, not to turn it into a method, but to describe its movement.
Chapter I – Successive Facts
How is the real experienced before thought?
We do not know that we are constant, because we believe we live in events. The world unfolds like an evening news report: facts, decisions, emotions succeeding one another, each erasing the previous one. Every day brings its share of novelties, and we mistake this news feed for life itself. Time appears full because it stirs, a restlessness that substitutes for being. Duration turns into a passage from one alert to the next, as if to exist meant to stay informed. What we call “experience” is often nothing more than an assembly of consecutive moments.
This fascination with rupture gives the illusion of a more intense life. We believe that to endure is to wear out, while to change is to live. Yet what we call change often merely shifts the scenery of the same scene. The age, with its speed and cult of novelty, reinforces this belief. It drives us to begin again without resuming. The gesture repeats, but consciousness imagines itself elsewhere. We spend our lives believing that we are beginning, when in truth we are continuing.
And that is no accident. Rupture flatters everything modern consciousness likes to believe about itself: that it chooses, that it decides, that it invents itself. Rupture gives the thrill of beginning — the thrill of the free individual who turns the page, who “changes life.” It is a staging of the power to detach. But looked at closely, this taste for rupture is often a disguised fear. Fear of duration, of repetition, of the form that settles. Continuity demands bearing the same — and that is what our era bears least. We prefer shock, novelty, the instant that can be commented on. Everything that lasts seems suspect: habit, fidelity, repetition. These are renamed stagnation, lack of ambition, inertia. Rupture has become the modern way to prove that one is still alive. It has replaced contemplation. Instead of inhabiting continuity, we break it to feel something. That is why it fascinates: it gives us the impression of movement where there is mostly escape. One could say rupture is a simulacrum of birth. It mimics the original event, but without a true origin. It merely replays the desire to begin, without ever lasting long enough to found anything.
Constancy, on the other hand, is not spectacular. It does not display itself; it is felt. It promises nothing; it holds. And in a world thrilled by its own change, holding on seems almost subversive. Yet beneath this agitation, something persists. Facts follow one another, but the hand remains the same. The gaze shifts its object, yet keeps its form. The body learns, unlearns, begins again; it keeps replaying the same pattern. We repeat, but this repetition is not empty: it constitutes us. Constancy hides in automatism, not in will. Not knowing that one repeats may be the very condition for enduring. For if consciousness saw repetition immediately, it would turn away. It would grow weary. Continuity must first act without knowing, like a bodily memory that precedes thought. The human being acts before understanding; returns before choosing. Only after countless returns does one perceive that one is returning. Knowledge always comes later, as a shadow cast over the act.
Thus constancy is not a virtue one decides upon, but an energy that precedes us. It first appears in the most modest forms: routine, fatigue, the need for habit. What seems lukewarmness is often silent perseverance. We mistake return for weakness, though it already carries the strength to endure. In every repetition, a fidelity works without our knowing it. The world of successive facts is therefore not chaos. It is the site of a hidden coherence, an active unconsciousness. Constancy acts before thought, as a rhythm beneath the tumult. To recognize this rhythm is not to wish to direct it. It is simply to see that beneath the surface of events, something holds us together — and that this discreet continuity is already a form of attention to the real.
The first awakening will consist in attuning oneself to that presence, not to master it, but to let it appear.
Chapter II – Repetition
How does repetition open the consciousness of the gesture?
To begin again. The verb seems neutral, yet it already carries an entire world. It implies that a first attempt has taken place, that it has left a trace, and that one returns to it. This return is nothing automatic. It is a way of remaining in contact with what resists.
To repeat is to test the limit of the gesture. The body comes back to where it stumbled, where thought has not yet found its passage. Each return reopens the same difficulty, but from another angle. The real, faithful to itself, presents itself in the same form and forces us to reform ourselves in order to meet it.
The rhythm establishes itself this way — not as a backdrop to time, but as a mode of existence. By returning again and again, attention adjusts, perception sharpens, movement organizes itself. What one believed to be a mere repetition becomes something different. Repetition becomes a slow trial of transformation. It produces no result; it shapes a way of being in the world.
Within this emerging continuity, something more intimate shifts. The subject who acts discovers themselves acted upon by what they repeat. Identity ceases to be given: it repeats itself, it rewrites itself with every attempt. Habit begins here — not as routine, but as embodied memory. The body thinks before we do.
When repetition deepens, the gesture loses its character of task. It becomes presence. One no longer repeats to correct, but to be equal to the real. Movement ceases to belong to will; it belongs to the rhythm of the world.
Writing, walking, learning, loving — all follow this movement. One does not repeat to succeed, but to recognize oneself. Through returning, one discovers that the form found is not a result but a way of being. Constancy is no longer an idea to pursue; it is exercised in silence, in the attention given to what one does again. Repetition then becomes a presence, and presence, a form of clarity.
This is where habit is born — not as a sleep within sameness, but as an awakening to an inner form. It takes up the gesture in order to make it a place. What we do often ends up defining us. Repetition, once lived as constraint, becomes fidelity to a way of existing.
Chapter III – Habit
How does a practice, born from repetition, gain vitality?
To repeat is first to encounter resistance. The body returns to where action fails to stabilize. In that return, something tightens: attention fixes itself on the point of imprecision. Through repeated returns, the gesture finds its direction. Habit is born in this zone of insistence, where difficulty persists long enough for an adjustment to take form. What adjusts is not only the movement, but the relation between what one intends to do and the manner of doing it. Practice does not add more attempts; it transforms the link between intention and execution. As this link refines itself, it gives the gesture a new quality: it no longer wears out through effort, it organizes itself. Habit appears as the stability of a relation that has found its axis.
As this stability takes hold, body and thought cease to act separately. The body retains what thought has understood, and thought trusts what the body accomplishes. This silent passage between them releases energy. The gesture becomes lighter, more present. Vitality arises from this balance in which action sustains itself. Form emerges from this adjusted repetition — not as an imposed idea, but as a structure discovered through experience itself. Habit makes visible the internal coherence of the gesture, a coherence perceived only after being lived. Practice no longer imitates a model; it generates its own logic.
This logic makes change possible. When a form becomes stable, it creates a terrain for exploration. The gesture no longer repeats itself in emptiness; it varies within a framework that supports it. Habit becomes a space of freedom: it allows variation to exist without rupture. The vitality of a practice is born from this living continuity. Each repetition deepens the relation between thought, body, and the real. It is not movement that gives life, but the way one lives it.
Thus understood, habit closes nothing; it keeps open the possibility of a gesture ever more just.
Chapter IV – Practice
How can one be reconciled with regularity?
Habit settles in without our awareness; practice is chosen. Between the two lies a threshold — that of consciousness. Habit still carried the innocence of a gesture forming without knowing it was forming. Practice marks the moment when one understands that what one repeats is shaping them, and when one decides to maintain that shaping. It is no longer only the body that retains; it is the will that renews. Each morning, each return, each repetition becomes an act. One does not practice automatically; one practices because one has understood that continuity constitutes us.
This passage from habit to practice introduces the responsibility of the gesture. One no longer undergoes repetition; one assumes it. One now knows that one is giving oneself a form, engraving dispositions within, imperceptibly modifying what one is. Aristotle saw it clearly: one becomes just by acting justly, courageous by acting courageously. Hexis — that stable disposition acquired through repetition — does not arise by chance but through exercise. Practice is an immanent ethics: it does not ask what we should be; it shows that we become what we do. The pianist does not simply play the piano; he becomes someone who inhabits sound differently. The writer does not merely handle words; he becomes one for whom language itself becomes a field of existence.
To practice is to accept that nothing reveals itself all at once. Practice rejects the immediacy that the modern world demands at every moment. It belongs to a temporality not of measurable results but of invisible maturation. It requires faith in the process, not in the outcome. This long time is not passive waiting; it is its own economy, that of imperceptible transformation. Each gesture adds a layer one does not see being laid down. What seems to be the same repetition silently alters the texture of being. Practice is patient not out of virtue but out of lucidity: it knows that depth is not conquered; it is carved.
Such patience demands renunciation. One cannot do everything. To practice is to choose a terrain and remain within it, to focus energy where it can dig deep. The modern world celebrates infinite openness, the multiplication of possibilities, the freedom to try everything. Practice imposes a fertile closure. It does not deprive; it concentrates. Sloterdijk reminded us: you must change your life. The human being is not an open being toward everything, but one who works upon themselves vertically. Practice is that assumed verticality. It refuses dispersion in order to reach thickness. Renouncing the unlimited is not a loss; it is a condition. Without this deliberate withdrawal, nothing deepens.
Practice does not suppress impulses; it organizes them. It does not reject drives; it channels them. What one feels remains, but it no longer dictates everything. Commitment is not the negation of desire but its shaping. One continues to want, yet learns to want along a direction.
And this withdrawal is far from comfortable. Practice does not seek to abolish difficulty; it sustains it. It deliberately maintains the tension between mastery and incompletion. It knows it will never end, that perfection is not a goal but a horizon receding as one advances. This maintained resistance is what distinguishes it from mere competence. One can be competent and rest within what has been acquired. Practice refuses the illusion of the definitive. It keeps alive the vigilance of the gesture — that attention which knows that nothing is ever fully resolved. The Zen shoshin, the beginner’s mind, names this quality: keeping the freshness of beginning within the deepest repetition. Never believing one knows, continuing to search within what one already masters. Practice is tireless demand — not out of anxiety, but out of fidelity to the real.
For to practice is to dialogue with the real. It is not to impose one’s will upon the world, but to learn to listen to it. Each repetition reveals a nuance, a resistance, a possibility. The sculptor listens to the stone; the writer listens to the language; the walker listens to the terrain. The real is no longer an object one works upon; it becomes a partner whose laws one learns. This dialogue transforms the relation to knowledge: one no longer understands by observing from outside, but by doing. Practice is an active hermeneutics. It interprets through gesture, deciphers through repetition. What the body learns, thought can no longer ignore. Merleau-Ponty spoke of the body as “I can”: not an object one possesses, but a power one inhabits. Practice shifts knowledge from representation to embodiment. The musician no longer thinks of where the keys are; his fingers know. Knowledge has settled into the flesh; it has become living memory.
Practice confronts one with oneself. It compels us to discern what nourishes from what distracts. Through repeated return, one discovers what holds, what resists time, what continues to speak when novelty has been exhausted. Practice becomes a filter: it reveals lasting pleasures, those one can resume without weariness. It recenters us on what truly matters — not through austerity, but lucidity. We then organize ourselves around what builds us, granting time to what nourishes existence. Practice does not forbid pleasure; it teaches us to recognize it.
This embodied memory alters perception. The one who practices no longer sees the world as before. Practice creates its own system of values, priorities, sensibilities. It organizes existence around itself. The walker no longer crosses space; they inhabit it. The cook no longer tastes like a guest. The writer no longer reads like an innocent reader. Practice becomes a filter through which the real reveals itself differently. It does not distort; it unveils dimensions the untrained eye cannot perceive. It is not that the world changes, but that the relation to the world deepens. Practice constructs a place from which to see, a position from which to feel. It turns the one who practices into a different being — not through accumulation of skills, but through transformation of presence.
And this transformation leads to a form of autonomy. At first, one practices to improve, to obtain, to achieve. One practices in order to. Then comes the moment when practice ceases to be a means and becomes its own end. One no longer practices because one wants something; one practices because it is there that one fully exists. Practice is no longer what one does; it is that through which one inhabits the world. This shift marks a liberation. Action no longer depends on external reward; it draws its justification from its own consistency. It becomes a place of existence, not a mere activity. This is the moment when exercise transforms into an art of living. The Greek askêsis named this: not deprivation, but training as a principle of existence. To practice is to prepare oneself, to test oneself, to shape oneself. Foucault saw in it a “technique of the self,” a way of constituting oneself as subject. Practice makes life a deliberate exercise, a work never finished but inhabited more fully each day.
Thus understood, practice is neither the habit that forms without us, nor the routine that confines us, nor yet the second nature that will come later. It is the moment of conscious engagement, when one accepts to build oneself through what one repeats. It is the inner architecture that will allow constancy to stand without emptying itself. It prepares the ground — the ground where routine can be traversed without peril, where method can be shaped with lucidity, where second nature can emerge without rigidity, and where passion can burn without consuming. Practice is the soil. What it builds is not yet complete, yet already something stands. A form has arisen. And that form now calls for its own trial.
Chapter V – Routine
Why does routine inspire fear?
Practice built an inner architecture, a conscious commitment within repetition. But that architecture can empty itself. Routine is the moment when regularity loses its transparency. What once sustained attention ends up absorbing it. The accord between body and thought remains, yet the gesture no longer refers to anything. The real ceases to be an interlocutor; it becomes mere scenery. One still acts, but without inner passage. It is this perceptible void, this absence within the gesture, that makes routine unsettling. It preserves the form of presence, but without presence itself.
What frightens us is not repetition, but the feeling that everything could go on without us. Action becomes automatic, time circular. The day begins again like a copy without origin. The mind no longer finds footing. What was once called constancy turns into confinement. Routine erases the why of the act. It removes from the world its resistance, and from consciousness its necessity. The human being becomes a spectator of their own exactitude.
The fear also comes from the gradual slide: one does not see routine arriving. It settles first as a reassuring order, then extends until it covers life. What once protected becomes armor. Regularity, by prolonging itself, closes in upon itself. It is no longer the continuity of attention, but the continuity of forgetfulness. The fear is not of effort, but of meaning fading beneath the comfort of gesture. The mind recognizes in it its own fatigue.
Yet routine is not a fault. It shows that form has grown too heavy. The world becomes predictable, and it is that very predictability that drains its flavor. The fear of routine is not fear of order, but fear of the absence of event. Order that no longer allows itself to be disturbed becomes dead order. Without imbalance, vitality withers; the soul demands surprise as the body demands air.
But there is another reading: routine may not be the enemy, but the mirror of our relation to the real. It is not routine that empties life, but we who cease to inhabit it. The danger lies not in repetition, but in the withdrawal of consciousness. Where the mind remains attentive, routine transforms into rhythm. It is not the form that must be feared, but the distance one takes from it. The fear of routine reveals less our boredom than our forgetfulness of the world. Routine then becomes an admonition from the real. It reminds the one who acts that they have closed in on themselves, that they have lost the outside. But this admonition is not a condemnation. Routine tests constancy: it shows whether presence still holds or has already withdrawn. It does not destroy vitality; it tests its solidity. When action ceases to be dialogue, it turns into inner murmur, into repetition without response. What we call boredom or stagnation is not absence of event, but absence of relation. Routine warns: without openness to what exceeds us, continuity hardens, and vitality retreats.
Chapter VI – Method
Lucidity Applied to Action
Method, in its deepest sense, is not a set of rules but a form of organized vigilance. It cannot be taught as a code; it is learned as a way of seeing. It is the means by which one gives oneself a path through the complexity of the real, without getting lost or rigidified. Method arises when repetition (doing), habit (stability), and practice (mastery) have matured enough to produce an awareness of the process itself. In other words, it appears when one begins to see how one acts.
It is not foreign to the body or to gesture; it is their silent reflection. It is no longer merely the moment of acting, but the moment when action becomes conscious of itself. Method is lucidity applied to action. It seeks clarity, but not rigidity. It does not aim for efficiency, but for the understanding of the inner movement that makes an action just.
For Descartes, method orders doubt to allow thought to orient itself within clarity. For Bachelard, it corrects the mind so that it remains open to discovery: method is not a fixed rule but a critical exercise in vigilance. For Ignatius of Loyola, it becomes a discipline of attention — a way of keeping the mind awake in the midst of action. In all three, method transforms the fear of disorder into discernment. It does not prevent the unpredictable; it gives it a place.
This is what radically distinguishes it from routine: routine repeats without seeing, method repeats to understand. Where routine confines, method illuminates. It represents the reflective moment of constancy, the passage from the gesture that succeeds to the consciousness of what makes it right. After habit, which stabilizes, and practice, which embodies, method orients: it gives the gesture a conscious direction, an inner architecture that allows constancy to become intelligence.
But method is not always invented. Often, it is received. One may borrow it from another, take it up from a tradition, an art, or a science. It condenses the experiences of those who explored before us: it is a memory of the real, a shared form of wisdom. Yet this externality has value only when it becomes interiorized. One does not follow a method; one enters into method. What is received remains alive only on the condition of being re-experienced.
Shared method is a form of transmission. It precedes and sustains us. It is the collective moment of constancy — the transmissible part of what, in others, has already found its rightness. But a method becomes one’s own only through experience. To copy is to lose oneself in the master’s shadow. To experience is to understand what, within rigor, can become breathing. The student who imitates learns to redo. The one who understands learns to see.
Every truly lived method passes through a crisis. There comes a moment when another’s rule no longer quite fits, when the inherited form no longer expresses what one seeks. Then the method transforms. This passage marks the birth of autonomy: the rule becomes an inner principle. What one once followed becomes that by which one now directs oneself. The method of another, lived through to the end, becomes a personal method. It keeps its structure, but it breathes differently.
Thus understood, method is not a framework but a movement. It joins order and freedom, memory and invention. It is the conscious continuity of constancy. Method marks the moment when constancy becomes transmissible. It is no longer only the experience of a body or a mind, but a clear form that can be given, resumed, shared. It is constancy become language.
Chapter VII – Second Nature
When does form become freedom?
Second nature is not an addition to the first; it is the first become conscious of itself. Habit, practice, and method have slowly shaped a way of being that no longer needs to recall its own rule. Action unfolds in a single motion — simple, precise, almost silent. What has been learned is no longer redone; it is lived.
Ravaisson said that habit is the passage from will to nature. That is exactly it: what was once willed becomes spontaneous. The gesture is no longer an act of will, yet it retains the memory of will. It no longer depends on consciousness, yet it extends its clarity. Second nature is freedom become ease. It is not the forgetting of effort, but its grace.
It cannot be acquired by calculation. It settles, slowly, like an imprint of one’s relation to the real. Through repeated adjustment, the gesture ceases to search. Through repeated observation, thought ceases to doubt. What at first required vigilance becomes a way of being. Body and mind find a shared line: they no longer have to align themselves; they breathe together.
Second nature is not perfection; it is a state of rightness. One does not reach purity, but continuity. Action becomes natural because it is exact, and exact because it is natural. It aims at nothing beyond itself — and in that, it is free. Aristotle spoke of hexis to describe this acquired disposition: virtue as the stability of the right relation. Zhuangzi described the butcher Ding, whose knife never dulls because it follows the joints of the flesh without forcing. Both images say the same thing: the art of no longer acting against the world, but with it. Second nature does not replace the first; it refines it, pacifies it.
This moment of constancy fulfills the entire process. One no longer seeks to endure; one endures. One no longer strives to be present; one is. Regularity now requires no will; it renews itself. The real ceases to be resistance; it becomes partner. Action finds its rightness in the economy of gesture, thought in the clarity of consent.
Second nature is not a state of rest. It remains open, available. Its tranquility comes from not needing to defend itself. It is not the opposite of movement but its most fluid form. Constancy here is no longer struggle or discipline; it becomes style.
Yet this spontaneity carries a risk. Second nature can turn into blind automatism. What once liberated can confine. The flowing gesture becomes mechanical when vigilance fully withdraws. Second nature therefore demands a paradox: to be spontaneous without ceasing to be attentive, to act without effort yet without forgetfulness. It is vigilance embodied — an attention that has become flesh but remains awake. The butcher of Zhuangzi does not close his eyes: his gesture is free because he remains present.
Conclusion: Constancy, or the Clarity of Becoming
Constancy is neither a trait nor a moral quality. It names the most accurate relation between life and the form it takes. Each stage of the journey — repetition, habit, practice, routine, method, second nature, passion — has revealed a way of inhabiting that relation, a degree of consciousness in the accord between movement and stability.
At the beginning, constancy seeks itself in the repetition of facts. It takes shape through returning gestures, through resistances that recur. The body learns what thought does not yet know. Gradually, regularity becomes fidelity, and repetition rises into form. Constancy is not deduced; it is experienced in duration, in the attention to what persists.
What persists does not oppose change. It contains and directs it. Constancy is not permanence; it is the rhythm of becoming. It organizes transformation without freezing it; it allows novelty to take root. Through it, time ceases to be mere succession and becomes lived continuity.
The path of constancy crosses repetition that forms, habit that stabilizes, practice that engages, routine that threatens, method that clarifies, second nature that frees, and passion that intensifies. At each stage, consciousness sharpens, gesture refines itself, form reveals itself. What once seemed mere continuity becomes living architecture. Constancy is not the repetition of the same; it is fidelity to what transforms.
Constancy imposes nothing; it reveals. It does not belong to will, but to accord. It is acquired through the patient meeting between the real and one’s gaze. So understood, it does not promise perfect stability. It offers an orientation. It teaches a way of standing within the flow — neither resistance nor surrender, but living fidelity. Its learning leads less to mastery than to rightness: it teaches how to live according to the rhythm of the world, to recognize in repetition the possibility of a form, and in form the promise of freedom.
This journey is not linear. Depending on the intensity invested in regularity, certain moments deepen more than others. Method may remain a shared tool, applied with rigor but without full adherence. Second nature marks a higher degree: the gesture becomes self-constitution. Passion, finally, signals the maximal intensity: existence itself organizes around what one practices. Each degree reveals a mode of inhabiting the real.
Constancy, in the end, is not an end. It is the ground of becoming. It allows each thing to grow according to its measure, each gesture to retain the memory of its origin, each life to unite with what it traverses. Through it, existence gains clarity: it ceases to be a succession of instants and becomes a work in formation. Constancy does not hold the world back; it gives it breath. It does not fix life; it lets it come into being.