Practice of Constancy

Dialogue with the Real

Introduction

Human beings seek to last beyond the passing instant. They want to feel that days unfold by more than habit, that something of themselves endures. They display their birthdays on social media so they’ll be remembered, as if being forgotten once meant never having mattered. They binge-watch series that prolong fiction when reality runs dry, because in fiction, at least, events follow a thread, characters have a path, something takes shape. They join a gym as if starting anew, convinced that this time they’ll keep going, that this time they’ll become someone, a conviction slowly crushed by the world’s pace. These gestures all say the same thing: I want to leave a trace, I refuse to vanish without having existed. Beneath the agitation lies fear, fear of insignificance, of having been only a fleeting weightless passage. Immortality hides in the noise, for lack of a place to root itself.
In daily life we are not simply scattered: we endure reality as a string of disconnected facts. Things happen, follow one another, contradict each other. Nothing binds, nothing coheres. Existence unfolds without form, without an inner axis to give it unity. Bergson reminded us that life is understood only through duration, that inner continuity linking instants and giving them meaning. What does this mean? Imagine a melody: each note, taken alone, says nothing. It is their sequence that creates sense. Duration is this power to hold together what succeeds itself, to turn a series of moments into a living form. Yet we almost never live in that duration. In its place: a collage of alerts, notifications, interruptions. We mistake the flow of information for the flow of our lives. Where duration disappears, everything freezes or collapses.
And within this inner void, the outer world strikes harder. The world, indifferent, goes on, imposing its rhythm, its violence, its accidents. The mind, absorbed in its private life, shuts itself off from what exceeds it. Then violent events break through, reminding us brutally that existence is fragile, exposed, perpetually at risk. This violence is not exception but structure. The human being feels it, suffers it, and tries to shield against it.
Such weakness calls for structure. Unable to live with uncertainty, we turn to what promises solidity: systems, methods, ready-made frameworks. We demand answers, orderly routines, truths that stand upright. This need for coherence turns to dependence: humans stop seeking understanding and instead crave guidance, reassurance. Hannah Arendt called this the flight from the “fragility of human affairs”: modern humanity cannot bear that things be fragile, uncertain, changing. It prefers the artificial stability of systems, fixed rules, rigid frames, to the living durability of relationships, practices, and evolving forms. Continuity is replaced by rule, movement by structure.
But rigidity breaks. It protects for a while, then imprisons. To escape paralysis, another kind of constancy is required, not mechanical repetition, but a living fidelity to the real, a way of holding firm without freezing, of enduring without smothering movement. Kierkegaard called it repetition: beginning again, but consciously. Nietzsche made it the measure of freedom: saying yes to the world even in its recurrence. Simone Weil saw in it pure attention, and Zhuangzi, the precision of a gesture attuned to the flow. In all these visions, constancy is not rigidity but breath, what keeps life open without letting it unravel.
This text begins there: with the absence of inner structure, the need for a binding axis. It asks how constancy can become that axis, not a fixed rule, but a breath: a way of dwelling in reality without fleeing it, of bearing its density without dissolving into it.
The path toward constancy cannot be decreed. It moves through stages: repetition that shapes, habit that steadies, practice that commits. It crosses the routine that threatens, the method that illuminates, the 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 define a method, but to describe its movement.

CHAPTER I – SUCCESSIVE FACTS
How is reality experienced before thought?
We are unaware of our constancy because we believe we live within events. The world unfolds like the evening news: facts, decisions, emotions succeeding one another, each erasing the last. Every day brings its dose of novelty, and we mistake that newsfeed for our own existence. Time feels full because it stirs, a restlessness that replaces presence. Duration shrinks to the passage from one alert to another, as if existence consisted in staying informed. What we call “experience” often reduces to an assembly of successive instants.
This fascination with rupture creates the illusion of a more intense life. By rupture, one means the clean break, the radical shift, the restart that erases what came before. Changing jobs, cities, relationships, as if novelty itself guaranteed intensity. We believe that to last is to wear out, while to change is to live. Yet what we call change often merely shifts the scenery of the same play. The age, with its speed and its cult of the new, confirms this belief. It urges us to begin again without ever continuing. The gesture repeats, but consciousness imagines itself elsewhere. We spend our lives believing we begin, while in truth we persist.
This is no accident. Rupture flatters everything modern consciousness loves to believe about itself: that it chooses, decides, invents. It gives the thrill of beginning, the thrill of the free individual who “turns the page”, who “starts a new life.” It stages the power of detachment. Yet, beneath it, this taste for rupture often hides fear fear of duration, of repetition, of form taking hold. Continuity demands the strength to sustain sameness, and that is what our age tolerates least. We prefer shock, novelty, the instant we can comment on. Anything that lasts looks suspicious: habit, fidelity, recommencement. We call it stagnation, lack of ambition, inertia. Rupture has become the modern way to prove we are still alive. It has replaced contemplation. Instead of dwelling in continuity, we break it to feel something. That is why rupture fascinates: it gives the impression of movement where there is mostly escape. One could say rupture is a simulacrum of birth, it imitates the original event but without a real origin. It endlessly replays the desire to begin, never lasting long enough to found anything.
Constancy, by contrast, has nothing spectacular about it. It does not show; it endures. It promises nothing; it holds. And in a world intoxicated by its own change, holding firm seems almost subversive. Yet beneath the agitation, something persists. Facts succeed one another, but the hand remains the same. The gaze shifts its object yet keeps its shape. The body learns, unlearns, begins again; it keeps replaying the same motif. We repeat, but that repetition is not empty; it builds us. Within automatism lies constancy, not within will. Not knowing that one repeats may be the very condition for enduring. For consciousness, if it saw repetition too clearly, would turn away, grow weary. Continuity must first act in ignorance, as a bodily memory preceding thought. The human being acts before understanding; returns before choosing. Only after countless returns does one realize one has returned. Knowledge always arrives later, a shadow cast upon the act.
Constancy, then, is not a virtue one decides but an energy that precedes us. It first appears in modest forms: routine, fatigue, the need for habit. What seems tepid often hides silent perseverance. We mistake recurrence for weakness, though it already carries the strength to endure. In every return, a hidden fidelity is at work. The world of successive facts is not chaos. It is the site of a concealed coherence, an active unconsciousness. Constancy acts before thought, like rhythm beneath turmoil. To recognize that rhythm is not to wish to control it, but 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 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 phrase sounds like failure. To begin again is to admit one did not succeed the first time. It means repeating what should have been resolved, returning to where one thought the task was complete. In the modern imagination, to start over signals weakness, impotence, stagnation. Yet this devaluation hides something essential: to begin again is also to persist, to refuse to give up, to accept that reality resists and to choose to stay in contact with that resistance.
To begin again already contains a whole world, a creative one. It presupposes 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 language of learning: one starts over because one has not yet understood, because the gesture is not yet right, because the body has not yet absorbed what the mind seeks. Beginning again maintains dialogue with what does not yield immediately.
To repeat is to encounter the limit of the gesture. The body returns to the point of resistance, where thought has not yet found its passage. Each reprise reopens the same difficulty from another angle. Reality remains faithful to its form: the stone keeps its hardness, language its constraints, the landscape its slope. We must reshape ourselves to meet it. The world’s form does not change; our manner of approaching it does. Repetition accepts that the real does not bend, and discovers that we can.
At first, one repeats without seeing. The gesture unfolds in opacity; the body performs without the mind grasping what happens. One redoes because one has failed, without yet knowing where or why. Repetition remains blind, mechanical, a raw insistence.
Then something shifts. Within repetition, differences start to appear. One attempt flows better, another catches. A movement passes where yesterday it stuck. Awareness awakens through contrast: variation becomes visible. One does not yet understand the structure, but one perceives that not all repetitions are alike. The body gropes its way forward, and this exploration generates a diffuse knowledge, something works, something resists.
Rhythm settles in: not as decoration of time, but as a mode of being. Gradually attention adjusts, perception refines, movement organizes. What seemed a redo becomes something else. Repetition reveals itself as the slow trial of transformation. It produces no result, it shapes a way of being in the world, and of seeing it. Each return alters the gaze. What was opaque becomes legible. What was chaos takes form.
Then understanding arrives. One no longer merely senses differences but begins to see why they exist. The gesture that succeeds does not do so by chance: it follows a logic. The angle of support, the instant of release, the distribution of weight, all this appears as structure. Awareness moves from “it works” to “it works because.” The mind now recognizes what the body had already discovered.
Within this emerging continuity, something more intimate begins to move. This movement is not outward; it is not about changing place or object. It is the inner stance that shifts, the relation to one’s own action. The subject who acts discovers being acted upon by what it repeats. Identity stops being given; it repeats itself, rewriting with each attempt. What we thought we were reveals itself as what we do.
Finally, the awareness of the gesture appears. One no longer repeats merely to succeed, but in full knowledge of what one is doing. The gesture reaches transparency. From within, one perceives how it unfolds, where it finds balance, how it adjusts to the real. What the body once knew in silence, the mind can now follow, name, recognize. Repetition has completed its work: it has made conscious what was once blind.
Gradually, the gesture changes in nature. At first it was a task, something to accomplish, to complete, to finish. But when the return has been made often enough, the gesture loses its burden. It becomes presence. One no longer repeats to correct an error; one repeats because that is where existence takes place. Movement no longer belongs to will; it belongs to the world’s rhythm.
Writing, walking, learning, loving, all follow this movement. We do not repeat to succeed, but to recognize ourselves. In this persistence, we discover that the form found is not a result but a way of being. Constancy is no longer an ideal to pursue; it is practiced silently, in the attention given to what we redo. Repetition becomes presence, and presence becomes clarity.
What emerges here is the possibility of embodied memory: the body begins to retain, anticipate, and structure itself around the returning gesture. What we do often ends up defining us. Repetition, once lived as constraint, becomes fidelity to a way of existing. The ground is prepared for something more stable to take root: 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 installs itself without our knowing; practice is chosen. Between them lies a threshold: consciousness. Habit still carried the innocence of the gesture forming without knowing it formed. Practice marks the moment one understands that what is repeated shapes us, and one decides to maintain that shaping. The body no longer retains alone: will intervenes, not to invent the gesture from nothing, but to orient what already exists. Repetition has done the groundwork: it has carved the groove, stabilized movement, embodied form. Will merely confirms it, choosing to sustain it consciously. It forces nothing, it affirms: yes, this is the direction I want to take.
Each morning, each return, each reprise becomes an act. Practice is never automatic: it is a deliberate continuity, a chosen constancy.
This passage from habit to practice introduces responsibility for the gesture. One no longer endures repetition; one assumes it. But what exactly does one assume? That what one repeats transforms. One accepts being modified by what one does. Responsibility here is not moral but lucid: knowing that one gives oneself a form, engraves in oneself dispositions, and chooses one shape over another. One knows now that one imperceptibly alters what one is.
Aristotle saw this: we become just by doing just acts, courageous by acting courageously. Hexis, that stable disposition acquired through repetition, does not arise by chance but through exercise. Practice is immanent ethics: it does not ask what one must be, it shows that we become what we do. The pianist does not merely play the piano; he becomes someone who inhabits sound differently, hearing nuances inaudible to others, feeling vibration before it resonates, thinking in harmonics and silences. Sound is no longer external; it becomes substance of thought. The writer does not merely wield words; they become one for whom language is a ground of existence, where thinking and writing no longer separate, where thought searches itself through the sentence, and the real reveals itself in syntax.
To practice is to accept that nothing reveals itself at once. Practice rejects the immediacy demanded by the modern world. It unfolds within a time that belongs not to measurable result but to invisible maturation. It requires faith in process, not outcome. This long time is not passive waiting: it is the economy of imperceptible transformation. Each gesture adds a layer one cannot see forming. What seems identical slowly alters the texture of being. Practice is patient not from virtue but from lucidity about time: it sees that each gesture deposits an invisible stratum, that transformation is slow but real.
This patience demands renunciation. One cannot do everything. To practice is to choose a field and remain in it, focusing energy where it can dig deep. Modern life celebrates infinite openness, the multiplication of possibilities, the freedom to try everything. Practice imposes a fertile narrowing. It does not deprive; it concentrates. Sloterdijk reminded us: you must change your life. The human being is not open to everything but works upon itself vertically. Practice is this assumed verticality. It rejects dispersion to reach depth. Renouncing the limitless is not loss but condition. Without that deliberate confinement, nothing deepens.
Practice does not suppress impulses; it organizes them. It does not reject desire; it gives it form. What one feels remains, but no longer dictates everything. Commitment is not denial of desire but its architecture. One continues to want, but learns to want in a direction. Impulses, instead of scattering, discipline themselves; they find their place in the structure of practice. What once distracted becomes peripheral. What nourishes becomes central. Practice tempers without suffocating: it gives impulses a frame within which they can endure.
And this narrowing is anything but comfortable. Practice does not seek to abolish difficulty; it maintains it. It deliberately keeps tension between mastery and incompletion. It knows it will never finish, that perfection is not a goal but a horizon receding as one advances. This sustained resistance distinguishes it from mere competence. One can be competent and rest in achievement. Practice refuses that illusion. It keeps alive the vigilance of the gesture, that alertness which knows nothing is ever fully resolved. Zen shoshin, the beginner’s mind, names this quality: preserving freshness within the deepest repetition, never believing one knows, continuing to search within what one masters. Practice is relentless not from anxiety but from fidelity to the real.
For practice is dialogue with the real. It does not impose will on the world but learns to listen. 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 ceases to be an object worked upon; it becomes a partner whose laws one learns. This dialogue transforms knowledge itself: one no longer understands by observing from outside but by doing. Practice is 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 possessed but a power inhabited. Practice shifts knowledge from representation to embodiment. The musician no longer thinks where the keys are; the fingers know. Knowing has settled into the flesh, become living memory.
For those who live in pure thought, practice is a saving return. Intellectuals easily lose themselves in abstraction, spinning in the mind, building castles of concepts that no longer touch 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 that something resists, that the world cannot be reduced to ideas. The body becomes physician to the wandering mind.
And practice serves another, quieter function: it keeps one standing. When the inner world collapses, when meaning withdraws, when depression hovers, practice offers minimal continuity. The gesture returning day after day prevents total fall. One no longer knows why one lives, but one still knows how one does. Practice acts as a buoy: it keeps one afloat, preventing dissolution. It resists without curing. And sometimes, holding on is enough for life to return.
Practice confronts the self. It forces one to discern what nourishes from what distracts. Through persistence, one discovers what holds, what endures through time, what continues to speak when novelty fades. Practice functions as a filter: it reveals durable pleasures, those one can repeat without weariness. It separates passing intoxication from substantial joy. What fascinates for an instant vanishes in repetition; what truly nourishes strengthens. Practice is a test of truth: it shows what constitutes us versus what merely passes through. It recenters us on what truly matters, not through austerity but lucidity. We organize around what builds us, giving ourselves the moments that feed existence. Practice does not forbid pleasure; it teaches us to recognize it.
Practice alters perception. It builds its own system of sensitivities. The walker no longer inhabits space as before, the cook no longer tastes as a guest, the writer no longer reads as an innocent reader. Practice constructs a position from which to see, to sense. It transforms not by adding skills but by changing the manner of being present to the world.
This transformation leads to a form of autonomy. At first, one practices toward something, to progress, to obtain, to achieve. Then comes the moment when practice ceases to be means. One no longer practices because one wants something; one practices because that is where existence feels whole. Action no longer depends on outer reward; it draws its justification from its own consistency. Practice becomes an art of living, a work never finished but inhabited more fully each day.
Understood in this way, practice is neither the habit that forms without us, nor the routine that traps us, nor yet the second nature that will come later. It is the moment of conscious engagement, the acceptance of self-construction through what one repeats. It is the inner architecture that allows constancy to hold without emptying. It prepares the ground: where routine can be crossed without peril, where method can unfold with lucidity, where second nature can arise without rigidity, and where passion can burn without consuming. Practice is the ground. What it builds is not complete, but already something stands. A form has risen, and that form now calls for its own trial.

CHAPTER V – ROUTINE
Why does routine inspire fear?
Practice built an inner architecture, a conscious engagement in repetition. But that architecture can hollow out. Routine is the moment when regularity loses its transparency. What once supported attention ends up absorbing it. The accord between body and thought remains, yet the gesture no longer refers to anything. Reality ceases to be a counterpart; it becomes background. One still acts, but without inner passage. That perceptible void, that absence within the act, makes routine unsettling. It keeps the form of presence without presence itself.
What frightens us is not repetition, but the sense that everything could go on without us. Action turns automatic, time becomes circular. The day restarts like a copy with no origin. The mind finds no hold. What was once constancy turns into confinement. Routine erases the why of the act. It strips the world of its resistance and consciousness of its necessity. The human becomes spectator to their own precision.
The fear also comes from the gradual slide: one does not see routine coming. It settles first as a reassuring order, then extends until it covers life. What once protected becomes a shell. Regularity, stretched too far, closes upon itself. No longer continuity of attention, but continuity of forgetfulness. The fear is not of effort, but of meaning fading beneath the comfort of action. The mind recognizes its own fatigue there.
Yet routine is not a fault, if fault means moral failing or neglect of duty. Routine is a symptom: it shows that something has withdrawn. It signals that form has grown too heavy, that regularity has emptied of substance. One is not guilty of routine; one bears witness to it. It reveals exhaustion of presence, not transgression.
The world loses its flavor through its very predictability. The fear of routine is not fear of order, but of the absence of event. Order that admits no disturbance becomes dead order. Without imbalance, vitality fades: the soul needs surprise as the body needs air.
But there is another reading: routine is not the enemy but the mirror of our relation to reality. It does not drain life; we cease to inhabit it. The danger lies not in repetition, but in the withdrawal of awareness. Where attention endures, routine turns into rhythm. The threat comes not from form but from distance taken from it. The fear of routine expresses less our boredom than our forgetfulness of the world. Routine becomes a summons from the real. It reminds the one who acts that they have closed in on themselves, lost the outside. But this summons is not condemnation. Routine tests constancy: it shows whether presence holds or has already departed. It does not destroy vitality; it measures its strength. When action ceases to be dialogue, it becomes inner murmuring, self-repetition. What we call boredom or stagnation is not absence of event but absence of relation. Routine warns: without openness to what exceeds us, continuity stiffens, vitality retreats.
There is a darker side to routine, when it not only empties the gesture but precipitates inner collapse. When regularity becomes the only thing still standing, when one no longer knows why one continues but continues anyway, routine becomes minimal survival. It no longer organizes; it merely prevents total fall. One gets up, repeats the same actions, not by choice, but because one no longer knows how to do otherwise. Routine, here, is no longer structure but a makeshift raft. It keeps one afloat but leads nowhere.
Failure installs itself in this emptied repetition. Not the spectacular failure that makes an event, but the silent one: no longer finding reason for what one does. One fails to give meaning, fails to inhabit what one repeats. The gesture continues, but has become a ghost of itself. Collapse within continuity, one still stands, but no longer lives.
And yet even this failure serves a function. It reveals what had withdrawn. It forces acknowledgment that presence was gone, that form had hollowed out. Routine turned collapse is an alarm: it shows that something must change. It does not condemn; it warns. Failure, understood thus, is not the end of the path but a call to begin again otherwise. Sometimes routine must collapse for presence to return.

CHAPTER VI – METHOD
Lucidity applied to action

Routine revealed the limits of blind regularity. It showed that one can repeat without inhabiting, endure without being present. To escape that emptiness, a new dimension must enter: awareness of the process itself. Not only doing, but understanding how and why one does. Method responds to this necessity.

In its deepest sense, method is not a set of rules but a form of organized vigilance. It cannot be taught like a code; it is learned like a way of seeing. A way to give oneself a path through the complexity of reality, without getting lost or frozen. Method arises when repetition (doing), habit (stability), and practice (mastery) have matured enough to produce awareness of the process itself, the moment one begins to see how one acts.

It does not stand apart from the body or gesture; it is their silent reflection. Not just the moment of action, but the moment when action becomes conscious of itself. Method is lucidity applied to action. That lucidity concerns the process itself: it lets one perceive the structure of the gesture, understand how it works, discern the steps that compose it. One no longer merely acts; one perceives the inner architecture of what one does. Method makes the gesture intelligible: it reveals what within the act produces rightness. It allows anticipation of obstacles, adjustment of movement, transmission of what one has understood.

It seeks clarity, not rigidity. It aims not at efficiency but at comprehension of the inner movement that makes an action true. This distinguishes it from routine: routine repeats without seeing, method repeats to understand. Where routine confines, 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 opinion, the mind gives itself stages: to doubt methodically, isolate what resists doubt, rebuild from that firm point. The Cartesian method is a path through obscurity without getting lost; it turns the anxiety of disorder into a directed inquiry. Every method does the same: it does not deny groping, it gives it form.

Method represents the reflective moment, the passage from the gesture that succeeds to awareness of what makes it succeed. After habit stabilizes and practice embodies, method orients: it gives the gesture a conscious direction, an inner architecture that allows what endured without knowing to become intelligence, the capacity to discern, adjust, transmit. Intelligence here is not abstraction but lucidity about process. One no longer only acts; one knows why it works, can name the stages, foresee the difficulties, adapt the movement. Method makes the gesture legible to the one who performs it.

In Bachelard, method rectifies the mind so it remains open to discovery. It is not a fixed rule but a critical exercise of vigilance. The scientific spirit must constantly correct its habits, watch for its recurring errors. The Bachelardian method is an intellectual asceticism: it hunts down laziness, prejudice, premature certainty. It keeps the mind awake by obliging it to distrust itself.

In Ignatius of Loyola, method becomes discipline of attention, a way of keeping the spirit awake in the midst of action. The Spiritual Exercises leave nothing to chance: they organize time, structure reflection, guide self-examination. But this rigor does not aim at total control; it prepares discernment. The Ignatian method teaches one to distinguish what comes from oneself and what comes from elsewhere, to recognize inner movements without being carried away by them.

Across these three traditions, method transforms fear of disorder into discernment. It does not banish the unpredictable; it gives it a place. It does not promise mastery of everything; it offers a frame to avoid being overwhelmed.

But method is not always invented. Often, it is received. One can borrow it from another, inherit it from a tradition, an art, a science. It condenses the experience of those who explored before us: memory of the real, a shared form of wisdom. Yet this exteriority matters only if it becomes interiorized. One does not follow a method; one enters into it. What is received lives only when re-experienced.

Shared method becomes living only when 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 simply explain steps; they show, by their very presence, what it means to live according to that method. We do not merely learn rules; we learn from another who has tested those rules and turned them into a way of being. Transmission is not mechanical reproduction but living dialogue: one observes, resumes, adjusts to oneself.

Shared method is a form of transmission: it precedes and sustains us. It is the moment when private experience becomes communicable knowledge. Someone found a path, formalized it, rendered it shareable. Method allows others not to start from zero. It is heritage, what others have built can serve us. Yet that heritage remains external until tested. One can follow a method without truly inhabiting it, apply it rigorously without inner adhesion. At this first degree of regularity, one uses the tool without being transformed by it; one borrows the path without making it one’s own way of walking.

A method becomes truly ours only through experience. To copy is to get lost in the master’s shadow. One can reproduce gestures, follow instructions, but never grasp why they work. The imitator repeats surface without grasping structure. They can redo, but not adapt; the slightest change of context leaves them disoriented.

To experience is to discover what, within the rigor of method, can become breath, natural fluidity, movement that no longer costs effort. Breath is when the rule ceases to be an external constraint and becomes internal rhythm. One no longer follows it; one lives it. The breathed method no longer weighs; it carries. It becomes second nature without losing clarity. The one who understands begins to see: they perceive the internal logic, grasp the principles beneath the rules. They can improvise without betraying, adapt without losing accuracy. They no longer merely walk the path; they know why the path exists.

Every truly lived method passes through a crisis. There comes a moment when another’s rule no longer quite fits, when inherited form no longer suffices to express what one seeks. Then the method transforms. That passage marks the birth of autonomy: the rule becomes inner principle. What was followed becomes what guides. The method of another, lived to its end, becomes personal method. It keeps its skeleton but breathes differently.

Thus understood, method is not a frame but a movement. It binds order and freedom, memory and invention. It is conscious continuity, the link between what has been experienced and what remains to be discovered. It allows endurance without rigidity, repetition without blindness.

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 structure, can name it, break it down, explain its logic. Method translates experience into language: it makes communicable what would otherwise remain locked in individual gesture. Through it, practice becomes teaching, solitary repetition turns into shareable knowledge.

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, but conscious in a particular sense. Not a detached awareness observing from outside, but a deep reflexivity: one sees oneself act while acting, adjusts the gesture while living it, perceives its effect on the world at the very instant of movement. 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 single movement, simple, precise, almost silent. The rule, lived long enough, has simplified itself. What remains is essence: the essential movement freed from all that once burdened it. Second nature retains only the necessary. It has pruned away the accessory to keep the pure form. What was learned is no longer redone; it is lived.

Ravaisson said that habit is the passage from will to nature. That captures it well: what was once willed becomes spontaneous. But at what moment does will appear in this process? At the beginning, in practice. It kept repetition alive when the body grew tired; it directed energy when the mind dispersed. Will guided learning, sustained regularity. Then it gradually withdrew. It had fulfilled its task: it engraved the gesture into the flesh. Now the gesture no longer needs it. The gesture is no longer willed, but it bears the memory of will. It no longer depends on consciousness, yet it extends its clarity. Second nature is freedom become ease, not the forgetting of work, but its grace.

It is not acquired by 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 demanded vigilance becomes a way of being. Body and mind find a shared line: they no longer need to align; they breathe together. This shift is not only aligning action with purpose, that was practice. Something deeper occurs here: one ceases to aim. Intention, which guided gesture, dissolves. One no longer acts for something; one acts in action itself. The gesture becomes movement, and the movement becomes the very object it engages. 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 the action.

Second nature is not perfection but rightness. It is not purity that is reached, but continuity. Action becomes natural because it is exact, and exact because it is natural. It aims at nothing beyond itself. Intention, which once burdened gesture with an external goal, has vanished. The gesture is self-sufficient. In that lies its freedom.

Aristotle spoke of hexis to name this acquired disposition: virtue as stability in right relation. Take generosity. At first, giving requires effort. One hesitates, calculates, forces oneself. Will intervenes to correct natural reluctance. But with repetition, giving becomes spontaneous. One no longer wonders whether to give; one gives. Generosity has become hexis: a stable disposition, acquired by repetition, become second nature. The generous person no longer struggles against selfish impulse; that impulse 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 Cook Ding, whose knife never dulls because it follows the spaces in the flesh without forcing. Look closely: the cook carves an ox before a prince. His movement is fluid, musical. The prince marvels: how can he cut with such ease? The cook replies that, at first, he saw the ox whole, a solid mass, resistant. After three years, he stopped seeing it as a whole: he began to perceive the structure, the joints, the empty spaces. Now, after nineteen years, he no longer even sees with his eyes. He perceives directly the intervals. His mind no longer commands his hands; it follows what the body knows. The knife slips into the void between the bones. It does not cut; it glides. That is second nature: not acting against the world, but with it. The gesture follows the grain of reality instead of forcing it. The cook does not dominate the ox; he accompanies its form.

These two images, Aristotelian hexis and Zhuangzi’s cook, 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 and pacifies it. It does not erase resistance; it learns to inhabit it.

But second nature is not only fluidity of gesture; it is also protection. It creates automatisms that save us without thought, an acquired instinct of survival. The boxer who dodges before seeing the punch, his body reading precursors the eyes have not yet caught. The driver who brakes before identifying the danger, triggered by a flicker at the edge of vision. Second nature functions autonomously: it watches, anticipates, protects. The brain has rewired itself; neural circuits strengthened by repetition have become reflexes. Not thoughts, but structures. Second nature is an invisible armor, it defends without our knowing.

This degree of incorporation marks a higher intensity than method. With method, one could still apply rules from outside, use them without being changed. Here, that is over: the gesture has become constitution 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 consciousness to decide.

This moment completes the entire process. One no longer seeks to endure; one endures. One no longer strives to be present; one is. Regularity no longer requires will; it renews itself. The real is no longer resistance; it becomes partner. Action finds rightness in economy of movement, thought finds clarity in consent.

Second nature is not rest; it is open availability. Its calm comes from no longer needing defense. 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 holds a risk. Second nature can turn into blind automatism. What freed can imprison. The gesture that once flowed can harden if vigilance entirely fades. Second nature therefore requires a paradox: to be spontaneous without ceasing to be alert, to act effortlessly without forgetting. An embodied vigilance, an attention made flesh yet still awake. Zhuangzi’s cook does not close his eyes: his gesture is free precisely because it remains present.

CHAPTER VIII – PASSION
Quiet, creative passion

Second nature has accomplished what constancy aimed at: the gesture flows, the body knows, action happens without effort. Everything is in place. And precisely when everything is in place, when rightness has become ease, another movement awakens. No longer the question of form, but of intensity. Second nature freed the gesture; passion will set it ablaze.

When rightness turns to ease, desire changes status. Until now organized and channeled by constancy, it stops serving form. It becomes the organizer itself and structures an entire existence. Yet this desire has transformed. It no longer seeks excitement, stimulation, agitation. It has grown more inward. It now bears on presence itself, on the depth of relation to the gesture, on what in the act surpasses the act. No longer the question of doing well, but of fully inhabiting what one does and, in that fullness, reaching something that exceeds the gesture.

What is passion? Not one feeling among others, but a way of existing. Passion organizes a whole life around what one loves. It does not merely add intensity; it reshapes life altogether. Priorities, schedules, relationships, thoughts, everything orders itself by it. One no longer merely practices something; one lives by and for that practice. Passion is the highest degree of commitment: it makes what one does not an 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 meets its limit: the vitality patiently disciplined seeks to overflow. The center attracts and repels at once. From this pull comes what we call passion.

Passion is not a derangement of constancy but its deepening. It returns warmth to it. It introduces into balance the experience of disorder and, into mastery, the possibility of loss. It tests the strength of a freedom that knows how to burn without dissolving.

With passion arise tensions unknown to the earlier stages:

• Emotion and structuring: passion burns and carries and overflows, yet without the structure of constancy it consumes itself. The task: sustain intensity without losing form.
• Chaos and centering: passion upends established order and disturbs equilibriums, yet it does so around a single center. The task: accept upheaval without scattering.
• Dependence and autonomy: passion binds us to what we love; we depend on it to exist fully, yet this bond must not enslave. The task: be bound without being chained.
• Obsession and fidelity: passion concentrates attention and can invade, yet it can also be living fidelity. The task: distinguish what nourishes from what devours.
• Radicality and lucidity: passion demands a radical choice and a total narrowing, yet without lucidity that choice turns blind. The task: commit totally without self-deception.

Passion does not resolve these tensions; it holds them together. It does not choose between impulse and rigor; it subjects both to the same intensity. This power to hold opposites distinguishes creative passion from destructive obsession.

Through passion, constancy ceases to be simple continuity and becomes lived intensity. It carries tranquility into the depth of the living. Constancy, until now quiet, must face what both threatens and grounds it: the fervor of the real.

Passion is born from the gesture that has found its measure. It settles when continuity becomes density and effort turns into presence. It does not move the world by spectacle but by the depth of the bond it weaves between body and thought. It gives the movement a soul and the rigor a light.

Yet passion is not tranquil by nature. It bears a tension. It gathers the force of impulse and the risk of fixation: clinging to the beloved object, losing breath, losing flexibility. Fixation is when passion freezes, no longer varies, refuses any deviation. It becomes rigidity instead of remaining movement. The same fire that illuminates can consume. Hence the need for an axis, a form able to welcome its excess. Without structure, passion closes in and loses the breath of the real.

Passion and constancy stand in a delicate relation. Too much regularity extinguishes ardor; too much fire dissolves rigor. Their balance forms the maturity of the gesture: constancy gives direction, passion gives life. One assures continuity; the other prevents empty repetition. Passing through constancy, passion makes it sensitive and saves it from fatigue. Shaped by constancy, passion avoids dissolving. They do not oppose; they carry each other.

Spinoza said that joy is the passage from a lesser to a greater perfection. Though he spoke of passion as suffered affect, his concept of joy clarifies what is at stake here: passion as organization of existence. This passion increases our power to act. By drawing every force around it, it prevents dispersion. What was scattered converges. It makes fuel of everything around life for what sustains it.

And because it consents to the real, it can realize being. To consent is not to submit; it is to stop wasting strength in resistance. When one no longer forces the world, when one enters into dialogue with what resists instead of assaulting it, energy no longer exhausts itself in conflict. It can unfold. Passion that consents to the real no longer fights against it; it acts with it. In this economy of forces, it expresses fully what it is. It realizes being not by imposing it but by allowing it to actualize without inner obstacle.

Passion is not the opposite of lucidity. It is lucidity’s burning part. It shows that intensity can join with clarity, that the strongest movement can keep precision of gaze. It embodies a fidelity under tension: fidelity to what one loves, and to what one is becoming. It introduces into constancy the pulse of the living, the vibration that keeps any form from finishing too soon.

Quiet passion is not lukewarmness. It is ardor that has found its breath. 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. In that duration it discovers a form of joy unknown to urgency. Superficial pleasure comes and goes, spent in the instant. The joy of quiet passion deepens with time. It is born from repetition itself, from familiarity with what one loves, from intimate knowledge that keeps sharpening. One does not tire; one refines. Each return reveals a new nuance. Pleasure becomes dense, thick, substantial. It no longer needs novelty to endure; it finds in depth what others seek in change. Quiet passion delights in the same, endlessly.

This is passion that has understood that intensity is measured not by noise but by depth. It does not shout; it persists. It does not agitate; it deepens. It does not seek to impress; it transforms. Its tranquility is not lack of force but mastery of force. It does not renounce impulse; it gives impulse a form that lasts.

Passion assumes a radical narrowing. It organizes all existence around what one loves and, in doing so, excludes the rest. Not a lack, but a structural necessity: one cannot do everything. To choose intensely is to renounce extensively. Passion does not disperse; it concentrates. It does not multiply experiences; it deepens one direction. This exclusion is not deprivation but condition of possibility: because one renounces the rest, one can dwell deeply in what one chooses.

To practice with passion is to learn to die, not in the sense of preparing for the end. It is to learn to die metaphorically: to renounce the rest, to release what one cannot hold, to accept that everything passes without grasping everything. Passion requires successive deaths: one dies to other possibilities, to the illusion of doing everything, to the self-image that wants to remain open to all paths. It is a continual exercise in detachment: one binds oneself deeply to one thing, but releases what surrounds it. Death is not only biological end; it is each renunciation, each consented loss, each accepted passage. To learn to die is to learn to live through this succession of losses without falling apart. Passion trains that capacity: it renounces, loses, consents, and precisely because it knows how to lose, it can endure.

Passion does not abolish anxiety about death; it turns it into creative urgency. It makes limit a condition of possibility: because one cannot do everything, one can do deeply. Finitude is not the enemy of passion; it is its ground.

Nietzsche posed another question, more radical still: would you will this life again, exactly the same, for all eternity? Eternal return is not a belief but a test. It measures the vitality of what one lives. What exhausts us, consumes us, destroys us, we would not will again. What nourishes, builds, renders us alive, we could will without end.

Creative passion passes this test. It does not tire of what it does; it does not dream of elsewhere. It delights in the same, endlessly. It could will each gesture, each return, each reprise to come again 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; they reinforce each other. We will die; therefore each instant counts. And because each instant counts, one could will it to return. Passion concentrates existence in this tension: living as if each gesture were to return, while knowing it will be done only once. Such intensity makes passion not a refuge from death but an affirmation of life in spite of, and thanks to, death.

Thus quiet passion does not soften life; it makes it more real. It concentrates the force of desire in attention and turns intensity into a way of inhabiting the world. In the long apprenticeship of constancy, it represents freedom regained: the freedom to act without agitation, to will without forcing, to love without losing oneself. Constancy become fire, fire become clarity. Passion, because it organizes a whole life around itself, imposes a radical sorting. What practice began to clarify, passion completes. One no longer renounces by discipline but by 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 yet without full adhesion. Second nature marks a higher degree: the gesture becomes constitution of the self. Passion, finally, expresses the highest intensity: an entire existence organized around what one practices. Each degree reveals a way of inhabiting the real.

Constancy sheds light on what haunted the introduction: the desire for immortality. But it does not fulfill it through the promise of endless duration. It transforms it. Immortality, understood through constancy, 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, converging existence toward a single point. In that convergence, being reaches its maximum intensity. It does not endure indefinitely, but it exists completely. Immortality is not a question of quantity—how long—but of quality—to what degree of intensity. Constancy reveals that living one moment fully is worth more than existing vaguely for an eternity.

Constancy does not enclose itself. 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. That coherence draws the gaze, even in someone discreet. One recognizes the one who holds, who does not scatter, who has found their axis. They become an example, not because they seek to, but because constancy speaks for itself. It inspires others to find their own axis. It becomes transmissible, not as a method to apply, but as a presence that awakens.

Constancy, 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 the memory of its origin. Through it, existence is illuminated: it ceases to be a succession of instants and becomes a work in formation. Constancy does not fix; it lets become.