Practice of Constancy

Dialogue with the Real

Introduction

Human beings try to endure beyond the passing instant. They want to feel that days follow one another through something other than habit, that something of them carries on. They display their birthday on social networks so others think of them, as if being forgotten for a day meant never having mattered. They follow series that prolong fiction when reality runs dry, because in fiction at least events align, characters follow a path, something takes shape. They join a sports club as one takes a fresh start, convinced that this time they will hold on, that this time they will become someone, a conviction slowly crushed by the pace of the world. All these gestures say the same thing: I want to leave a trace, I refuse to vanish without having existed. Beneath the agitation lies a fear: insignificance, the sense of having been only a passing moment without weight. Immortality is sought in noise for lack of finding a place to root.
In daily life, we are not only scattered: we undergo reality as a chain of events. Things happen, follow, contradict one another. Nothing links them, nothing takes form. Existence unfolds without shape, without an inner axis to give coherence. Bergson reminded us that life is understood only in duration, that inner continuity that links moments and gives them meaning. What does this mean? Picture a melody: each note, taken alone, says nothing. Their sequence creates meaning. Duration is the capacity to hold together what follows, to turn a succession of moments into a living form. Yet we rarely live in duration. In its place we find a montage of alerts, notifications, breaks. We confuse information flow with our own life. Where duration fades, everything freezes or collapses.
In this inner emptiness, the external world grows harsher. The world moves on. Indifferent, it imposes its pace, its violence, its accidents. The mind, absorbed in personal concerns, closes itself to what exceeds it. Violent events remind it sharply: existence is fragile, exposed, always at risk. This violence is not exception but structure. Humans sense it, endure it, try to shield themselves from it.
Such fragility calls for a structure. Unable to deal with uncertainty, individuals turn to what promises solidity: systems, methods, ready-made frameworks. We ask for answers, organized routines, truths that stand firm. This need for coherence turns into dependence: the person stops seeking understanding and wants guidance, reassurance. Hannah Arendt described it as a flight from the fragility of human affairs: modern individuals refuse fragile, uncertain, changing things. They prefer the artificial stability of systems, fixed rules, rigid structures to the living durability of relationships, practices, evolving forms. They replace continuity with rule, movement with frame.
Rigid stability fails. It protects for a while, then confines. To escape this paralysis, another form of constancy is needed, not mechanical repetition but a living fidelity to the real, a way to endure without freezing, to last without smothering movement. Kierkegaard called it repetition renewed in awareness. Nietzsche made it the measure of freedom: saying yes to the world even in its recurrence. Simone Weil saw pure attention there, and Zhuangzi the accuracy of a gesture attuned to the flow. Through all these perspectives, constancy is not rigidity: it is the breath that keeps life open without letting it unravel.
This text begins here: with the absence of inner structure, with the need for an axis that links. It explores how constancy can become this axis, not a fixed rule but a breath: a way to inhabit the real without fleeing, to carry its density without losing oneself.
The path toward constancy cannot be decreed. It unfolds through stages: repetition that shapes, habit that stabilizes, practice that commits. 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 turning 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 reality experienced before thought?

We do not know we are constant because we believe we live inside events. The world unfolds like an evening news report: facts, decisions, emotions following one another, each erasing the previous one. Each day brings its share of novelty, and we mistake this newsfeed for our own existence. Time appears full because it stirs, a restlessness that replaces. Duration shrinks into the passage from one alert to the next, as if existing consisted in staying informed. What we call “experience” often becomes a montage of successive instants.
This fascination with rupture gives the illusion of a more intense life. By rupture we mean the clean break, the radical shift, the restart that wipes the slate. Changing jobs, cities, relationships, as if novelty guaranteed intensity. We believe that to endure is to wear out, while to change is to live. Yet what we call change often only shifts the scenery of the same scene. The era, with its speed and cult of the new, reinforces this belief. It pushes us to begin again without truly taking up again. The gesture repeats, but consciousness imagines itself elsewhere. We spend our time believing we start anew while we simply continue.
And this is no accident. Rupture flatters everything modern consciousness loves to believe about itself: that it chooses, decides, invents itself. Rupture gives the thrill of beginning, the thrill of the free individual who turns the page, who “changes their life”. It is a staging of the power to detach. But if we look closely, this taste for rupture often hides fear. Fear of duration, of repetition, of form settling in. Continuity asks us to endure the same, which our time finds hardest. We prefer shock, novelty, the instant we can comment on. Anything that lasts appears suspicious: habit, loyalty, renewed effort. We call these stagnation, lack of ambition, inertia. Rupture becomes the modern way of proving to ourselves that we are still alive. It replaces contemplation. Instead of inhabiting continuity, we break it to feel something. This is why rupture fascinates: it creates the impression of movement where there is mostly escape. One could say rupture is a simulacrum of birth. It imitates the original event without any real origin. It only reenacts the desire to begin, never lasting long enough to found anything.
Constancy has nothing spectacular. It does not display itself, it is felt. It makes no promises, it holds. And in a world excited by its own change, holding on almost seems subversive. Yet beneath this agitation something insists. Facts succeed one another, but the hand remains the same. The gaze shifts from one object to another but keeps its form. The body learns, unlearns, begins again; it keeps replaying the same motif. We repeat, but the repetition is not empty: it builds us. Within automatism lives constancy, not within will. Failing to know we repeat may be the condition for enduring. If consciousness saw repetition immediately, it would turn away. It would tire. Continuity must first operate without knowing, like a memory of the body preceding thought. Humans act before they understand; they return before they choose. Only after countless returns do they notice they return. Knowledge comes later, like a shadow cast on the act.
Constancy is not a virtue one decides but an energy that precedes us. It appears first in its most modest forms: routine, fatigue, need for habit. What looks like lukewarmness often hides quiet perseverance. We confuse return with weakness, though it already carries the strength to endure. In every renewed act, a loyalty works without our awareness. The world of successive facts is not chaos. It is the place of hidden coherence, of active unconsciousness. Constancy acts before thought, a rhythm beneath the tumult. Recognizing this rhythm does not mean wanting to direct it. It simply allows us 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 be to attune oneself to this presence, not to master it but to let it appear.

CHAPTER II – REPETITION
Does repetition allow awareness of the gesture?

To begin again. The verb sounds like failure. To begin again is to admit we did not succeed on the first attempt. It is to repeat what should have been resolved, to return where we thought we were done. In the modern imagination, beginning again signals weakness, powerlessness, stagnation. Yet this devaluation hides something essential: beginning again is also perseverance. It is refusing to give up. It is accepting that the real resists, and choosing to remain in contact with that resistance.
Beginning again already carries a whole world, a creative world. It implies that a first attempt took place, that it left a trace, and that one returns to it. This return is not automatic. It belongs to the vocabulary of learning: one begins again because understanding has not yet come, because the gesture is not yet right, because the body has not yet integrated what the mind seeks. Beginning again keeps the dialogue open with what does not yield immediately.
To repeat is to test the limit of the gesture. The body returns to where it stumbled, where thought has not yet found its passage. Each renewed attempt reopens the same difficulty, but from another angle. The real stays faithful to its form: stone keeps its hardness, language its constraints, terrain its slope. We must reshape ourselves to meet it. The form of the world does not change; our manner of approaching it transforms. Repetition accepts that the real does not bend, and discovers that we can.
At first one repeats without seeing. The gesture takes place in opacity, the body acts without consciousness grasping what happens. One does it again because one has failed, but without yet knowing where or why. Repetition remains blind, mechanical. It is no more than raw insistence.
Then something shifts. Within repetition, one begins to feel differences. One attempt slides more easily, another catches. A movement passes where it blocked yesterday. Consciousness awakens through contrast: what varies becomes visible. One does not yet understand the structure, but senses that not all repetitions are equal. The body gropes, and this exploration produces a diffuse knowledge: something works, something resists.
A rhythm settles: not as a backdrop to time, but as a mode of existence. Attention adjusts, perception sharpens, movement organizes. What one believed to be the same act becomes other. Repetition reveals itself as a slow transformation. It does not produce a result; it shapes a way of being in the world and of seeing it. Each return changes the gaze. What was opaque becomes readable. What was chaos takes form.
Then comes understanding. One no longer merely feels the differences but begins to see why they exist. The gesture that succeeds does not succeed by chance: it follows a logic. The angle of support, the moment of release, the distribution of weight all appear as structure. Consciousness moves from “it works” to “it works because”. The mind now recognizes what the body discovered.
Within this emerging continuity, something more intimate shifts. This shift is not external; it is not about changing place or object. Interior life itself moves: the way one stands before the gesture, the relation to one’s own action. The subject who acts discovers themselves acted upon by what they repeat. Identity stops being a fixed state: it repeats, it rewrites itself with each attempt. What we believed we were reveals itself as what we do.
Finally the consciousness of the gesture appears. One no longer repeats only to succeed; one repeats knowing what one is doing. The gesture reaches its transparency. One perceives from within how it unfolds, where it finds balance, how it fits the real. What the body knew silently, the mind can now follow, name, recognize. Repetition has done its work: it has made conscious what was first blind.
Little by little, the gesture changes in nature. At the beginning it was a task, something to accomplish, to succeed, to finish. But with enough returns, it loses the feeling of a chore. It becomes presence. One repeats not to correct error but because this is where one exists. Movement ceases to belong to will; it belongs to the rhythm of the world.
Writing, walking, learning, loving all follow this movement. We do not repeat to succeed, but to recognize ourselves. In this persistence, one discovers that the form found is not a result but a way of being. Constance is no longer an idea to pursue: it exercises itself silently, in the attention given to what one does again. Repetition becomes presence, and presence clarity.
What arises here is the possibility of embodied memory: the body begins to retain, anticipate, structure itself around the returning gesture. What we do often ends up defining us. Repetition, once experienced as constraint, becomes fidelity to a way of existing. The ground is prepared for something more stable to settle: habit.

CHAPTER III – HABIT
How does habit free the gesture?

Repetition begins with resistance. The body returns to the point where action fails to stabilize. In this return, something tightens: attention fixes on the zone of imprecision. In repetition, the gesture searches for its direction, fumbles, stumbles again. But one day, something gives way. What blocked unravels. The movement that demanded effort, vigilance, constant correction suddenly begins to flow. The difficulty has not vanished; it has been absorbed.
Habit is born from this release. It arises in that zone where difficulty, having persisted long enough, finally resolves itself. The gesture finds its passage. What adjusts is not merely the outer movement but the internal relation between intention and execution. At first, thought and action were separate: the mind willed, the body struggled. Now the link becomes fluid. Intention translates directly into movement. The body anticipates; it knows before receiving the command. As this link refines itself, the gesture acquires a new quality: it no longer wastes itself in effort, it organizes itself. Organization here means economy, less tension, more precision. The gesture finds the shortest path between will and act.
Habit appears as the stability of a relation that has found its axis. As this stability settles in, body and thought cease to act apart. The body retains what the mind has understood, and the mind trusts what the body performs. This silent passage between them releases energy. Where every detail once required supervision, attention can now withdraw without collapse. The body holds by itself. The gesture gains lightness, presence. Vitality comes from this balance where action sustains itself.
This ease is not laziness; it is embodied mastery. Form emerges from adjusted repetition, not as an idea imposed from above, but as a structure discovered through experience itself. Habit makes visible the internal coherence of the gesture, a coherence perceptible only after it has been lived. The gesture no longer imitates an external model: it generates its own logic, born of progressive adjustment to the real.
And that stability makes change possible. Paradoxically, once a form stabilizes, it creates a ground for exploration. The gesture no longer repeats emptily; it can vary within a structure that supports it. Habit opens a space of freedom: it allows variation to exist without rupture. The pianist who masters technique can improvise. The walker who knows their step can adapt to the terrain. Stability does not confine; it opens.
Habit is a relief. It marks the moment when the body stops fighting itself, when the mind can release its anxious vigilance. What was trial becomes breath. Movement settles into living continuity. Each return deepens the relation between thought, body, and reality. It is not yet a way of living that gives life, that will come later, with second nature or passion. Here, movement itself sustains life: the capacity to act without inner obstacle, to feel the body respond, to know that action is possible.
Habit closes nothing. It keeps open the possibility of a gesture that works. It is the foundation on which everything else will rest. Without it, no lasting practice, no living method, no second nature. It is the silent condition of constancy, that moment when the body has learned, the gesture holds, and one can finally rely on oneself.
But this stability raises a question: what should be done with this acquired ease? Let it unfold by itself, or make something more of it? Habit, when left unconscious, can fade into routine. But when it becomes conscious, when one chooses to sustain and deepen it, it turns into practice. This passage, from endured habit to chosen habit, opens the next chapter.

CHAPTER IV – PRACTICE
How does a practice, born of repetition, gain vitality?

Habit settles without our awareness; practice is chosen. Between the two lies a threshold: consciousness. Habit still carried the innocence of a gesture forming without knowing it formed. Practice marks the moment when one understands that what one repeats shapes them, and when one decides to maintain that shaping. The body no longer retains on its own: will intervenes, not to invent the gesture from nothing, but to orient what already exists. Repetition has done the heavy work: it has carved the groove, stabilized the movement, embodied the form. Will chooses to renew this repetition, to give it a conscious direction. It does not force; it confirms. It says: yes, this is where I want to go.
Each morning, each return, each renewed act becomes an action. One does not practice through automatism: one practices because one understands that continuity constitutes us.
This passage from habit to practice introduces responsibility for the gesture. One no longer undergoes repetition; one assumes it. But what is assumed, exactly? That what we repeat transforms us. One accepts being altered by what one does. Responsibility here is not moral but lucid: knowing that one gives oneself a form, that one engraves dispositions into oneself, and choosing this form rather than another. One now knows one modifies, imperceptibly, what one is.
Aristotle saw this clearly: we become just by acting justly, courageous by acting courageously. Hexis, this stable disposition acquired through repetition, is not the result of chance but of exercise. Practice is an immanent ethics: it does not ask what one must be; it shows that we become what we do. The pianist is not only playing piano; he becomes someone who inhabits sound differently, who perceives nuances inaudible to others, who feels vibration before it resonates, who thinks in harmonics and silences. Sound is no longer external; it becomes material for thought. The writer does not merely handle words; he becomes someone for whom language becomes a ground of existence, an existence where thinking and writing no longer separate, where thought seeks itself through the sentence, where reality reveals itself through syntax.
To practice is to accept that nothing reveals itself at once. Practice rejects the immediacy demanded by the modern world at every moment. It belongs to a temporality not of measurable results but of invisible maturation. It asks for trust in process, not in outcome. This long time is not passive waiting: it is a particular economy, that of imperceptible transformation. Each gesture adds a layer one cannot see deposit. What seems to be repeated identically silently modifies the texture of being. Practice is patient not by virtue but by lucidity regarding time: it sees that each gesture adds an invisible layer, that transformation is slow yet real.
This patience requires a renunciation. One cannot do everything. To practice is to choose a terrain and remain with it, to concentrate energy where depth can be carved. The modern world celebrates infinite openness, multiplication of possibilities, freedom to try everything. Practice, instead, imposes a fertile narrowing. It does not deprive; it focuses. Sloterdijk reminded us: you must change your life. Humans are not beings open to everything but beings who work themselves vertically. Practice is this assumed verticality. It refuses dispersion to access depth. Renouncing the unlimited is not a loss but 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 present but no longer dictates everything. Commitment is not the negation of desire but its shaping. One continues to want but learns to want along a direction. Impulses, instead of scattering us, become disciplined by the structure of practice itself: they find their place within its architecture. What once distracted becomes peripheral. What nourishes becomes central. Practice tempers without smothering: it gives impulses a frame within which they can endure.
And this narrowing is not comfortable. Practice does not aim to abolish difficulty; it maintains it. It keeps alive the tension between mastery and incompletion. It knows it will never be finished, that perfection is not a destination but a horizon that withdraws as one advances. This maintained resistance distinguishes it from mere competence. One may be competent and settle into what has been acquired. Practice refuses the illusion of the definitive. It keeps the vigilance of the gesture alive, that attention which knows nothing is ever fully resolved. Zen’s 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 unrelenting not from anxiety but from fidelity to the real.
For practice engages a dialogue with the real. It is not imposing one’s will upon the world but learning to listen to it. Each repetition reveals a nuance, a resistance, a possibility. The sculptor listens to the stone, the writer listens to language, the walker listens to the terrain. The real is no longer an object to be worked; it becomes a partner whose laws are learned. 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 capacity one inhabits. Practice shifts knowledge from representation to embodiment. The musician no longer thinks where the keys are; his fingers know. Knowledge settles in the flesh; it becomes living memory.
For those who live in pure thought, practice is a saving return. Intellectuals easily lose themselves in abstraction: circling within their minds, building conceptual castles that no longer touch the ground. Practice brings them back to the world. It forces the body into the equation. It imposes the resistance of the real as safeguard against empty speculation. To practice, for them, is to anchor: to restore weight to existence, to feel resistance, to encounter something the world does not let collapse into ideas. The body becomes the physician of the wandering mind.
Practice also has another function, less visible but essential: it keeps one upright. When the inner world collapses, when meaning slips away, when depression looms, practice offers minimal continuity. The gesture that returns day after day prevents total collapse. One no longer knows why one lives, but one still knows how to act. Practice acts as a buoy: it keeps afloat, prevents dissolution. It resists without healing. And sometimes, holding on is enough for life to return.
Practice confronts one with oneself. It forces a distinction between what nourishes and what distracts. In this persistence, one discovers what holds, what resists time, what continues to speak when novelty is exhausted. Practice functions as a filter: it reveals lasting pleasures, those one can take up again without weariness. It separates fleeting intoxication from substantial pleasure. What fascinates for a moment fades under repetition. What truly nourishes grows stronger. Practice is a test of truth: it shows what constitutes us, as opposed to what merely passes through. It recenters us on what truly matters, not through austerity but through lucidity. One then organizes oneself around what builds, one gives oneself the moments that sustain existence. Practice does not block pleasure; it teaches how to recognize it.
Practice alters perception. It creates its own system of sensitivities. The walker no longer inhabits space as before, the cook no longer tastes like a guest, the writer no longer reads like an innocent reader. Practice builds a position from which to see, from which to feel. It transforms not by accumulating skills but by modifying the way one is present to the world.
This transformation leads to a form of autonomy. At first, one practices for something: to progress, to obtain, to reach. Then comes the moment when practice ceases to be a means. One no longer practices because one wants something; one practices because this is where one fully exists. Action no longer depends on external reward; it draws its justification from its own consistency. Practice becomes an art of living: a work one never finishes but inhabits more deeply each day.
Understood this way, practice is neither the habit that forms without us nor the routine that confines, nor yet the second nature that will come later. It is the moment of conscious engagement, the moment when one accepts being shaped by what one repeats. It is the inner architecture that enables constancy to hold without emptying itself. It prepares the ground: where routine can be crossed without danger, where method can be developed with clarity, where second nature can arise without rigidity, and where passion can burn without consuming. Practice is the ground. What it builds is not yet complete, but already something stands. A form has risen. And this form now calls for its own test.

CHAPTER V – ROUTINE
Why does routine inspire fear?

Practice had built an inner architecture, a conscious engagement in repetition. But this architecture can empty itself. Routine is the moment when regularity loses its transparency. What once supported attention ends up absorbing it. The alignment between body and thought persists, but the gesture no longer refers to anything. The real stops being an interlocutor; it becomes backdrop. One still acts, but without inner passage. This perceptible emptiness, this absence inside the gesture, makes routine unsettling. It preserves the form of presence, but without presence itself.
What frightens us is not repetition but the impression that everything could continue without us. Action becomes automatic, time circular. The day begins again like a copy with no origin. The mind no longer finds support in it. What we once called constancy turns into confinement. Routine erases the “why” of action. It removes resistance from the world and necessity from consciousness. The human becomes a spectator of their own exactness.
Fear also comes from the gradual slide: one does not see routine approaching. It settles as a reassuring order, then expands until it covers life. What once protected becomes shell. Regularity, extending itself, closes in. Not continuity of attention but continuity of forgetting. Fear is not the fear of effort but of meaning disappearing under the comfort of gesture. The mind recognizes its own fatigue there.
Yet routine is not a fault if by fault we mean moral error or failure of duty. Routine is a symptom: it indicates that something has withdrawn. It signals that form has gained too much weight, that regularity has emptied itself of substance. One is not guilty of routine; one witnesses it. It reveals an exhaustion of presence, not a transgression.
The world loses its savor through its own predictability. The fear of routine is not fear of order but fear of the absence of event. Order that no longer allows disturbance becomes dead order. Without imbalance, vitality fades: the soul demands surprise as the body demands air.
But another reading exists: routine is not the enemy but a mirror of our relation to the real. It does not empty life; we cease to inhabit it. The danger does not come from repetition but from the withdrawal of consciousness. Where the mind remains attentive, routine transforms into rhythm. The threat does not come from form but from the distance we take from it. The fear of routine expresses less our boredom than our forgetting of the world. Routine becomes a warning from the real. It reminds the one who acts that they have folded inward, that they have lost the outside. Yet this warning is not condemnation. Routine tests constancy: it reveals whether presence holds or has already withdrawn. It does not destroy vitality; it examines its solidity. When action stops being dialogue, it becomes inner murmur, rumination. What we call boredom or stagnation is not absence of event but absence of relation. Routine warns: without openness to what exceeds, continuity freezes, vitality recedes.
A darker side of routine exists: the side where it not only empties the gesture but precipitates inner collapse. When regularity becomes the only thing that still holds, when one no longer knows why one continues but continues nonetheless, routine becomes minimal survival. It no longer organizes anything; it merely prevents total collapse. One gets up and repeats the same gestures, not by choice but because one no longer knows how to do otherwise. Routine here is no longer structure; it is makeshift raft. It keeps one afloat but leads nowhere.
Failure settles within this emptied repetition. Not spectacular failure, the kind that becomes event, but silent failure: failure to give meaning, failure to inhabit what one repeats. The gesture continues, but it becomes a ghost of itself. Collapse within continuity: one still holds on, but one no longer lives.
Yet even this failure has its function. It reveals what had withdrawn. It forces the recognition that presence was gone, that form had emptied itself. Routine transformed into collapse is an alarm: it shows that something must change. It does not condemn; it warns. Failure, understood this way, is not the end of the path but a call to begin again differently. Sometimes routine must collapse for presence to return.

CHAPTER VI – METHOD
Lucidity applied to action

Routine has shown the limits of blind regularity. It has revealed that one can repeat without inhabiting, endure without being present. To escape this emptiness, a new dimension must be introduced: awareness of the process itself. No longer only doing, but understanding how and why one does. Method responds to this necessity.
Method, in its deepest sense, is not a set of rules but a form of organized vigilance. It is not taught like a code; it is learned like a way of seeing. A way of giving oneself a path through the complexity of the real, without getting lost and without becoming rigid. Method arises when repetition (doing), habit (stability), and practice (mastery) have matured enough to produce 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 the gesture: it is their silent reflection. No longer only the moment of acting, but the moment in which action becomes conscious of itself. Method is lucidity applied to action. This lucidity bears on the process itself: it allows one to see the structure of the gesture, to understand how it functions, to discern the steps that compose it. One no longer merely acts, one perceives the internal architecture of what one does. Method makes the gesture readable: it reveals what, within action, produces its rightness. It allows one to anticipate obstacles, adjust movement, transmit what has been understood.
It seeks clarity, but not rigidity. Its aim is not efficiency, but understanding of the inner movement that makes an action just.
This distinguishes it radically from routine: routine repeats without seeing, method repeats in order to understand. Where routine encloses, method illuminates. In Descartes, method orders doubt so that thought can orient itself in clarity. It does not suppress uncertainty; it organizes it. Instead of enduring the chaos of opinions, the mind gives itself steps: to doubt methodically, to isolate what resists doubt, to rebuild from that firm point. Cartesian method is a path through obscurity without getting lost. It transforms the anxiety of disorder into a directed approach. This is what every method does: it does not deny groping; it gives it a form.
Method represents the reflective moment, 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 what endured without knowing to become intelligence, that is, capacity to discern, to adjust, to transmit. Intelligence here is not abstraction but lucidity regarding the process. One no longer simply acts; one knows why it works, one can name the steps, anticipate obstacles, adapt the movement. Method makes the gesture readable to the one who performs it.
In Bachelard, method rectifies the mind so it remains available to discovery. It is not a fixed rule but a critical exercise of vigilance. The scientific mind must constantly correct its habits, watch over its recurring errors. Bachelardian method is an intellectual asceticism: it tracks laziness, prejudices, premature certainties. It keeps the mind open by forcing it to distrust itself.
In Ignatius of Loyola, method becomes discipline of attention, a way of keeping the mind awake in the midst of action. The Spiritual Exercises leave nothing to chance: they organize time, structure reflection, guide the examination of conscience. Yet this rigor does not seek total control; it prepares discernment. Ignatian method teaches one to distinguish what comes from oneself and what comes from elsewhere, to recognize inner movements without getting lost in them.
In these three approaches, method transforms the fear of disorder into discernment. It does not prevent the unpredictable; it gives it a place. It does not promise to master everything; it offers a framework so one is not overwhelmed.
Yet method is not always invented. Often, it is received. One can borrow it from someone else, take it from a tradition, an art, a science. It condenses the experiences of those who explored before us: memory of the real, shared form of wisdom. Yet this externality has value only if it becomes interiorized. One does not simply follow a method; one enters into method. What is received remains alive only if it is experienced anew.
Shared method is received, but it becomes living only when it is embodied. One can read a method in a book, but one truly understands it by seeing someone inhabit it. The one who transmits does not merely explain the steps: through presence itself, they show what it means to live according to this method. One does not simply learn rules; one learns from another who has tested these rules and turned them into a way of being. Transmission is not mechanical reproduction; it is living dialogue: one observes, takes up, adjusts it to oneself.
Shared method is a form of transmission; it precedes and supports us. It is the moment when what was private experience becomes exposable knowledge. Someone has found a path, formalized it, rendered it shareable. Method allows others not to begin everything from scratch. It is an inheritance: what others have built can be used. Yet this inheritance remains external as long as it is not experienced. One can follow a method without truly inhabiting it, apply it rigorously without full adherence. First degree of intensity in regularity: one uses the tool without being transformed by it. One borrows the path without yet making it one’s own way of walking.
A method becomes ours only through experience. To copy is to lose oneself in the master’s shadow. One reproduces gestures identically, repeats instructions, but does not understand why it works. The student who imitates reproduces the surface without grasping the structure. They may learn to redo, but not to adapt. As soon as the context changes, they are lost.
To test a method is to understand what, in its rigor, can become breath, that is: natural fluidity, movement that no longer costs. Breath is that moment when the rule ceases to be an external constraint and becomes inner rhythm. One no longer follows it; one lives it. Method breathed in no longer weighs; it supports. It becomes second nature without losing its clarity. The one who understands learns to see: they perceive the internal logic, grasp the principles beneath the rules. They can then improvise without betraying, adapt without losing rightness. They no longer just follow the path; they know why that path exists.
Every method that is truly lived passes through a crisis. There comes a time when another’s rule no longer suits completely, when inherited form no longer suffices to express what one seeks. Method then changes. This passage marks the birth of autonomy: the rule becomes inner principle. What one followed becomes that by which one now directs oneself. The method of another, lived to the full, becomes personal method. It keeps its framework yet breathes differently.
Understood this way, method is not a frame but a movement. It links order and freedom, memory and invention. It is conscious continuity: it maintains the connection between what has been experienced and what remains to be discovered. It allows one to endure without becoming rigid, to repeat without becoming blind.
Method also marks the moment when what was practiced in silence becomes sayable. No longer only the experience of a body or a mind, but a clear form that can be given, taken up, shared. One can transmit it because one has understood its architecture. One can name it, break it down into steps, explain its logic. Method translates experience into language: it makes transmissible what, without it, would remain enclosed in individual gesture. Through it, practice becomes teaching; solitary repetition becomes shareable knowledge.

CHAPTER VII – SECOND NATURE
When does form become freedom?

Second nature is not an addition to the first: it is the first made conscious of itself, but conscious in a particular sense. Not a consciousness that observes from outside, but a kind of internal unfolding: one sees oneself acting while acting, one modifies the gesture while living it, one perceives its effect on the object at the very moment one acts. Consciousness no longer precedes action; it inhabits it. The gesture reaches transparency: one knows what one does without needing to think about it. This transparency is not reflection but immediate presence to oneself in action.
Habit, practice, and method have slowly shaped a way of being that no longer needs to recall its rule. Action unfolds in one movement, simple, precise, almost silent. The rule, by being lived again and again, has been simplified. Superfluous details have disappeared. What remains is the essential: the core movement, cleared of everything that burdened it. Second nature keeps only what is necessary. It has trimmed away the inessential to preserve only pure form. What one learned is no longer repeated; it is lived.
Ravaisson said that habit is the passage from will to nature. This describes what happens: what was willed becomes spontaneous. But at what point does will intervene in this process? At the beginning, in practice. Will sustained repetition when the body grew tired, oriented energy when the mind dispersed. It directed learning, supported regularity. But it gradually withdraws. It has done its work: it has engraved the gesture into the flesh. Now the gesture no longer needs it. The gesture is no longer willed, yet it retains the memory of will. It no longer depends on consciousness, yet it prolongs its clarity. Second nature is freedom become ease. Not the forgetting of effort, but its grace.
It is not acquired through calculation. It settles slowly, like an imprint of one’s relation to the real. Repeated adjustment ends the search. Sustained observation dissolves doubt. What once required vigilance becomes a way of being. Body and mind find a shared line: they no longer need to align themselves; they breathe together. This passage is not simply aligning action with a goal—that belonged to practice. Here something more radical occurs: one ceases to aim. Intention, which still guided the gesture, dissolves. One no longer acts for something; one acts within action. The gesture becomes movement, and movement becomes the object on which it takes effect. There is no more distance: subject, act, and world are one. It is a disappearance into action, not as loss of self but as fusion with what one does. One no longer watches oneself act; one is action.
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 seeks nothing beyond itself. Intention, which still interfered by imposing an external aim, has vanished. The gesture is sufficient in itself. This is what makes it free.
Aristotle used the term hexis to describe this acquired disposition: virtue as the stability of a right relation. Take a concrete example: generosity. At first, giving requires effort. One hesitates, calculates, forces oneself. Will intervenes to correct natural avarice. But with repeated acts of giving, the gesture becomes spontaneous. One no longer wonders whether one should give; one gives. Generosity becomes hexis: a stable disposition, acquired through repetition, made second nature. The generous person no longer struggles against selfish inclination; that inclination has been transformed. They act justly without effort because their character has been shaped in that direction. Aristotelian virtue is not repression of desire but transformation of desire itself.
Zhuangzi described the butcher Ding, whose knife never dulls because it follows the natural openings of the flesh without forcing. Look closely at the scene. The butcher is cutting up an ox before the prince. His gesture is fluid, almost musical. The prince is astonished: how can he cut with such ease? The butcher answers that at first, he saw the whole ox, a solid mass. Then, after three years, he stopped seeing the ox as a whole: he began to perceive its structure, joints, and spaces. Now, after nineteen years, he no longer sees with his eyes. He perceives the openings directly. His mind no longer commands the gesture; the mind follows what the body knows. The knife slides into the empty space between the bones. It does not cut; it slips through. This is second nature: acting not against the world but with it. The gesture fits the real; it no longer forces it. The butcher does not dominate the ox; he accompanies its structure.
These two images, Aristotelian hexis and Zhuangzi’s butcher, express the same truth: the art of no longer acting against the world but with it. Second nature does not replace the first; it refines it, calms it. It does not remove resistance; it learns to inhabit it.
But second nature does not concern only the fluidity of gesture. It is also protection. It creates automatisms that save us without conscious thought. A learned instinct of survival. The boxer who dodges before seeing the punch, his body having recorded the preliminary signals. The driver who brakes before identifying the danger, triggered by a movement in the peripheral field. Second nature works autonomously: it watches, anticipates, protects. The brain has rewired itself. Neural circuits have formed, strengthened through repetition, until they have become reflexes. No longer thoughts, but structures. Second nature is an invisible armor: it protects us without our awareness.
This degree of incorporation marks an intensity beyond method. With method, one can still apply the rule from outside, use it without being changed. Here, that is over: the gesture has become part of the self. One can no longer separate what one does from what one is. Second nature is not a tool one uses but a way of existing. The body thinks, anticipates, protects without waiting for conscious command.
This moment completes the entire process. One no longer seeks to endure; one endures. One no longer tries to be present; one is present. Regularity no longer requires will; it renews itself. The real ceases to be resistance; it becomes partner. Action finds its rightness in economy of gesture, thought in clarity of consent.
Second nature is not a state of rest. It remains open, available. Its tranquility comes from no longer needing to defend itself. It is not the opposite of movement but its most fluid form. Constance is no longer struggle or discipline; it becomes style.
But this spontaneity carries a risk. Second nature can become blind automatism. What once liberated can confine. The gesture that flowed can become mechanical if vigilance fully withdraws. Second nature therefore requires a paradox: to be spontaneous without ceasing to be attentive, to act without effort yet without forgetfulness. An embodied vigilance, an attention become flesh yet still awake. Zhuangzi’s butcher does not close his eyes: his gesture is free because he remains present.

CHAPTER VIII – PASSION
Quiet, creative passion

Second nature has accomplished what constancy aimed at: the gesture flows, the body knows, action unfolds without effort. Everything is in place. Yet precisely when everything is in place, when rightness has become ease, another movement awakens. No longer the question of form, but that of intensity. Second nature had freed the gesture; passion will set it on fire.
When rightness becomes ease, desire changes in status. Until then organized and channeled by constancy, it ceases to serve form. It becomes itself organizing principle: it structures the whole of existence. Yet this desire has transformed. It no longer seeks excitement, stimulation, agitation. It has spiritualized itself. It now bears on presence itself, on the depth of the relation to the gesture, on what, in the act, transcends the act. The question is no longer how to do well, but how to inhabit fully what one does, and in that fullness, to reach something that exceeds the gesture itself.
What is passion? Not one feeling among others, but a way of existing. Passion organizes the whole of life around what one loves. It does not merely add intensity to life; it restructures life entirely. Priorities, schedules, relationships, thoughts, all are ordered according to it. One no longer simply practices something; one lives by and for that practice. Passion is the highest degree of engagement: it makes what one does not one activity among others, but the central axis of existence.
This desire does not arise from lack, but from an excess of presence. It no longer wants only to endure; it wants to vibrate. Here constancy encounters its limit: the vitality it has patiently disciplined seeks to overflow. The center attracts and repels at once. From this tension arises what we call passion.
Passion is not a disruption of constancy, but its deepening. It restores warmth to it. It introduces into balance the experience of disorder, into mastery the possibility of loss. It tests the strength of a freedom that knows how to burn without dissolving.
With passion, tensions appear that the earlier stages did not know:
Emotion and structuring: passion burns, carries, overflows, but without the structure of constancy it consumes itself. The challenge: to maintain intensity without losing form.
Chaos and centering: passion shakes established order, upsets balances, yet does so around a single center. The challenge: to accept upheaval without dispersing.
Dependence and autonomy: passion binds us to what we love, we depend on it to exist fully, yet this dependence must not alienate us. The challenge: to be bound without being chained.
Obsession and fidelity: passion concentrates all attention, it can become invasive, yet it can also be living fidelity. The challenge: to distinguish what nourishes from what devours.
Radicality and lucidity: passion demands a radical choice, a total withdrawal from the rest, but without lucidity this choice becomes blind. The challenge: to commit fully without lying to oneself.
Passion does not resolve these tensions; it holds them together. It does not choose between impulse and rigor; it submits them to the same intensity. This capacity to hold opposites distinguishes creative passion from destructive obsession.
Through it, constancy ceases to be simple continuity and becomes lived intensity. Passion draws tranquillity into the depths of the living. Constancy, until now quiet, must confront what both threatens and founds it: the fervor of the real.
Passion arises from the gesture that has found its measure. It settles when continuity becomes density, when effort transforms into presence. It does not move the world by spectacle, but by the depth of the link it weaves between body and thought. It gives movement a soul and rigor a light.
Yet passion is not tranquil by nature. It carries within itself a tension. It gathers both the strength of the impulse and the risk of fixation: tightening around the loved object, no longer being able to breathe, losing all suppleness. Fixation occurs when passion solidifies, when it no longer varies, when it refuses any deviation. It becomes rigidity instead of remaining movement. The same fire that illuminates can consume. This is why it demands an axis, a form capable of welcoming its excess. Without structure, passion closes in and loses the breathing of the real.
Passion and constancy stand in a delicate relation. Too much regularity extinguishes ardor; too much fire dissolves rigor. Their equilibrium forms the maturity of the gesture: constancy gives direction, passion gives life. One ensures continuity, the other prevents empty repetition. In crossing constancy, passion makes it sensitive, saves it from fatigue. In structuring passion, constancy prevents it from dissolving. They do not oppose one another; they support one another.
Spinoza said that joy is the passage of a person from a lesser to a greater perfection. Although he spoke of passion in the sense of passive affect, his concept of joy illuminates what is at stake here: passion as organization of existence. Such passion increases our power to act. By concentrating all forces around it, it prevents them from dispersing. What was scattered converges. It makes fuel of everything: it transforms what surrounded life into energy for what carries it.
And because it consents to the real, it can realize being. To consent is not to undergo; it is to stop wasting one’s forces in resistance. When one no longer forces the world, when one enters into dialogue with what resists instead of assaulting it, energy does not exhaust itself in conflict. It can deploy itself. Passion that consents to the real no longer fights against it; it acts with it, and in this economy of forces, it fully expresses what it is. It realizes being not by imposing it, but by allowing it to actualize itself without inner obstacle.
Passion is not the opposite of lucidity. It is its burning part. It shows that intensity can join with clarity, that the strongest movement can keep the precision of the gaze. It embodies a fidelity under tension: fidelity to what one loves, and also to what one becomes. Within constancy, it introduces the beat of the living, the vibration that prevents any form from closing too early.
Quiet passion is not lukewarmness. It is ardor that has found its breathing. It burns without consuming because it knows how to alternate tension and release, presence and withdrawal. It does not exhaust itself in urgency; it inhabits duration. And in that duration it discovers a form of joy that urgency never reaches. Superficial pleasure comes and goes, and wears itself out in the moment. The joy of quiet passion deepens with time. It is born from repetition itself, from familiarity with what one loves, from intimate knowledge that never ceases to sharpen. One does not grow weary; one refines. Each return reveals a new nuance. Pleasure becomes dense, thick, substantial. It no longer needs novelty to persist: it finds in depth what others seek in change. Quiet passion rejoices in the same, endlessly.
This is passion that has understood that intensity is not measured by noise but by depth. It does not shout; it persists. It does not agitate; it deepens. It does not aim to impress; it transforms. Its tranquillity is not lack of force but mastery of force. It does not renounce impulse; it gives impulse a form that endures.
Passion accepts a radical withdrawal. It organizes the whole of existence around what one loves, and in doing so excludes everything else. Not as a lack but as a structural necessity: one cannot do everything. To choose intensely is to renounce extensively. Passion does not disperse; it concentrates. It does not seek to multiply experiences; it deepens one direction. This exclusion is not deprivation but condition of possibility: because one renounces the rest, one can inhabit what one chooses.
To practice with passion is to learn to die, though not in the sense of preparing for the end. It is to learn to die metaphorically: to renounce the rest, to let go of what one cannot hold, to accept that everything passes without clinging to everything. Passion demands successive deaths: one dies to other possibilities, to the illusion of doing everything, to the image of oneself that would like to remain open to all paths. A permanent exercise in detachment: one binds oneself deeply to one thing, and lets go of what surrounds it. Death is not only biological end, but each renunciation, each loss consented to, each passage accepted. To learn to die is to learn to live through this succession of losses without coming undone. Passion exercises this capacity: it renounces, loses, consents, and precisely because it knows how to lose, it can endure.
Passion does not abolish the anxiety of death; it transforms it into creative urgency. It turns limit into condition of possibility: because we cannot do everything, we can do something deeply. Finitude is not the enemy of passion; it is its ground.
Nietzsche posed another question, more radical still: would you want this life to return, exactly the same, eternally? Eternal return is not a belief but a test. It measures the vitality of what one lives. What exhausts, consumes, destroys us, we would not want to relive. What nourishes, builds, makes us alive, we could will endlessly.
Creative passion passes this test. It does not tire of what it does; it does not dream of elsewhere. It rejoices in the same, endlessly. It could want each gesture, each return, each repetition to come back eternally, because it flees nothing, because it inhabits fully what it does. Eternal return reveals what passion already knew: what is worth doing once is worth doing always.
Finitude and eternal return do not oppose one another; they reinforce one another. We will die, therefore each moment matters. And because each moment matters, we could want it to return. Passion concentrates existence within this tension: living as if each gesture were to come back, while knowing one will only perform it once. This intensity makes passion not a refuge from death but an affirmation of life despite, and because of, death.
Thus quiet passion does not soften life; it makes it more real. It concentrates the strength of desire in attention; it makes intensity a way of inhabiting the world. In the long apprenticeship of constancy, it represents regained freedom: the freedom to act without agitation, to will without forcing, to love without losing oneself. Constance become fire, fire become clarity. Passion, because it organizes the entire life around itself, imposes a radical sorting. What practice had begun to clarify, passion completes. One no longer renounces out of discipline but out of evidence: what scatters becomes unbearable beside what nourishes.

CONCLUSION: CONSTANCY OR THE CLARITY OF BECOMING

This path 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 constitution of the self. Passion, finally, indicates maximal intensity: the entire existence becomes organized around what one practices. Each degree reveals a way of inhabiting the real.
Constance clarifies what haunted the introduction: the desire for immortality. But it does not satisfy this desire by promising eternal duration. It transforms it. Immortality, understood through constance, is not infinite extension in time but fullness of being in the present. To exist fully is to realize one’s essence, to actualize what one is. Passion accomplishes this realization: it concentrates all forces, gathers existence toward a single point. In this convergence, being reaches its maximal intensity. It does not endure indefinitely, but it exists completely. Immortality is not a matter of quantity (how long?) but of quality (to what degree of intensity?). Constance reveals that living one moment fully is worth more than vaguely lasting an eternity.
Constance does not remain enclosed. It radiates. Not because the passionate person has a strong personality or particular charisma, but because a life organized around an axis creates a visible form. This coherence draws the eye, even in someone discreet. One recognizes the person who holds, who does not scatter, who has found an axis. They become an example: not because they seek it, but because constance speaks for itself. It inspires others to find their own axis. It becomes transmissible: not as a method to be applied, but as a presence that awakens.
Constance, finally, is not an end. It is the ground of becoming. It allows each thing to grow according to its measure, each gesture to retain memory of its origin. Through it, existence becomes illuminated: it ceases to be a succession of instants and becomes a work in formation. Constance does not fix; it lets things come into being.