Daily Practice

This week for Critical Experiences we were challenged to commit to a ~30 minute daily ritual to do for the next week. I have previously written about the benefits of undertaking a daily 100-day practice.However, this week, work was incredibly stressful, I had other homework to tackle, and my extracurricular commitments were piling up. In fact, its wasn’t until I went upstate on Friday to Dia Beacon and saw the endurance performance artist Tehching Hsieh’s lifework exhibit that I realized I had completely forgotten about my assignment.

As an aside, the exhibit was one of my favorites that I have ever seen. Tehching’s incredible commitment to his year long performances was inspiring, and honestly made me a bit jealous. It’s easy to make excuses as to why I couldn’t do something like his performance of not going indoors in nyc for 365 days. But his work shows that so much of our rules we set for ourselves and others is completely made up. As my dad says, “showing up is 90% of the job.” It’s incredible what single-minded consistency and dedication can achieve.

One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece)

Art / Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece)

But back to my, much easier, daily practice. Since, I forgot to start a new daily practice, I leaned more into my existing daily practice that I have been doing for nearly 200 days - learning Mandarin on Duolingo. I started this soon after my acceptance into IMA low res - I wanted to be at least somewhat prepared for my 2026 summer in Shanghai. I have mostly learned via Duolingo and character memorization, along with lots of informal practice with my very patient Chinese speaking friends and classmates.

I get a lot of flack for using Duolingo. A lot of people that say it doesn’t work, isn’t optimal for learning, etc. But I have learned a lot from it! Especially if I do more than a single lesson a day, the combination of learning new vocab, hearing the tones repeated over and over again, and the gamification of the app has kept me engaged for many months. My main rituals around the language learning is on the subway, in between climbs at the gym, and late at night before I fall asleep. It’s made me more excited to learn the language, and more excited to go to Shanghai! Being monolingual (minus a tiny bit of Spanish) has long been something I’ve been ashamed of, and it’s been good to turn that shame into action.

I still have yet to pick a topic for project 2, but maybe I should center it around something that could help me learn Chinese (feed two birds with one scone etc.) Either way, I am going to continue learning Chinese at least until I go to Shanghai!

Documentation for my daily practice - October 22-28. Notice no streak freezes used 🥳