The repetition called practice backstage becomes the repetition called tradition in the audience.

The same repetition has two names depending on where you are standing. Backstage it is practice, dull and corrective and full of failure. In the seats it is tradition, weighty and settled, as though it had always been done this way. The gap between those descriptions is where most institutions live.

Remember this when you encounter something that feels immemorial. Someone rehearsed it, and someone decided it. That does not make it less valuable, but it does mean it can be changed by the same means it was made. And in your own life, today’s grinding repetition is what will later look like simply how your family does things.