Recently I read somewhere, that it takes 10, 000 hours of consistent & persistent study to achieve Mastery over the subject at hand. The author of these remarks meant it quite literally, and meant for us all to add up the hours spent in serious study, and practice. If you are fortunate enough to attend a school of formal learning, they will do the math for you and assign you some letters to add after your name. This may make living in this new-normal world easier, or not. Time will tell.
The first book I was assigned to read when I began my yoga teacher training in 1998, was titled Mastery by George Leonard, and for me, the bookworm, it was a surprising and disappointing assignment. I was burning to dig into ancient indian texts on how to achieve enlightenment and change my life, and stuff like that. Mastery was small stuff. I am grateful that my thinking has evolved since I achieved my 10,000 hours.
With Saturn in Virgo residing in my third house, natally, I’ve always been quite picky about subject matters regarding intelligence, mental health, communications, education, and siblings. You will find me quite firm in my opinions regardless of how quickly said opinions change. And, change again. Mutable signs are like that.
Then there are the ten thousand sorrows and ten thousand joys that the Asian Buddhists write of. Why 10,000? Why not 11, 001?
I had a major spiritual awakening during a vedic math class once. I’ve never forgotten that moment and it has been a source of delight in my memory cells ever since. Numbers are a deep source of symbolic information, yes?
Wikipedia informs me that there is a 10,000 year clock , conceived in 1986 and currently being built by a group of new-normal-wizkids including Jeff Bezos , of Amazon, who donated 42 million towards this project! It’s called The Clock of the Long Now.
How appropriate.
But why, 10,000 years? Why not 11,001?
Other details to consider:
- 10,000 years = 864,000 ,000 seconds
- 14,400, 000 minutes
- 240,000 hours
- 1428 weeks (rounded down)
Then, sadly, of course, there is that ever vigilant, awake & ready army of 10,000 , which has been mythologized, dramatized, and institutionalized since 400 BC.
But the most recent incident of 10,000, the inspiration for this blog post, came in the mail from Amazon.com. It’s my new pedometer! It counts my steps. According to the new-normal-thinking of 2014, we need to take 10,000 steps a day if we want to lose weight, 6, 000 steps to maintain one’s fitness, etc. etc., and blah, blah, blah. I’ll let you know how it goes.
10,000?
And, last, just for fun : 10,000 Maniacs.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxW0CUaPWAE&w=420&h=315]
May you live for 10,000 years. Om shanti, shanti, shantihi.