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June 23, 2005 at 6:08 AM

Life is full of these little decisions that individually may not matter, but as a whole can determine your direction. French fries or salad? Exercise or watch TV? Practice or not practice?

I'm still in the early stages of my return to the violin, so usually it's not difficult to find the motivation to practice. But I didn't sleep much last night, had a stressful day at work, and it was 10:30 pm. I thought, "Well, my goal is four days a week, and that usually means four days between each lesson, but my lessons were less than a week apart this time, so if it were on Friday as usual, I'd still have four days because I'd be practicing tomorrow, and it's not that bad as long as I don't skip more than one day in a row, and I REALLY don't feel like working on those artificial harmonics tonight..." etc. etc. One can come up with lots of rationalizations.

So I went downstairs, figuring I'd do the last bit of housework and then go to bed. But my music was on the stand out in front of me, open...so I took my violin out of its case. Twenty minutes instead of the usual thirty, and I worked on vibrato and intonation instead of the artificial harmonics. But that's twenty minutes more than I'd planned, and one decision I made correctly tonight.