昔我往矣，杨柳依依。今我来思，雨雪霏霏。
《诗经·小雅·采薇》— When I first set out, the willows swayed in the warm breeze. Now that I look back, sleet falls heavy.
The Plans Never Work#
I keep a journal of failed plans.
Not as punishment. As evidence.
There’s the Stormwind patrol route I mapped out in four different ink colours that dissolved into absolute chaos the moment Lulureese spotted a stray cat. There’s the supply rotation I optimised across three pages that Brasskeese rewrote on the back of a napkin in thirty seconds. There’s the defensive formation for the Reckoning that I drilled the warband on for two weeks—the one that lasted exactly eleven seconds before Vyrneese got excited.
I used to think discipline was the plan. The clean execution. The demonstration that I had myself together, that I was worthy of the armour, the title, the expectations that followed my name around like shadows.
I thought if I looked disciplined enough, I’d eventually become it.
I was wrong about almost everything.
What I Was Actually Doing#
“You were performing. There’s a difference between performing discipline and practising it.”
Reyneese said this to me once, quietly, over tea I hadn’t asked for. The way she says things—without accusation, as though she’s simply reading from a text she’s consulted before—is more disarming than any argument.
I knew she was right immediately and resented it for about three days.
Performing discipline looks like: waking at a precise hour so others will note the hour. Training until the point of visible strain so the effort is legible. Making the plan, showing the plan, announcing the plan. Standing correctly so that discipline is the first thing someone sees when they look at you.
It’s exhausting because it requires an audience. The moment the audience leaves, there’s nothing holding it up.
Practising discipline looks like: doing the thing when no one is watching. When there’s no recognition waiting. When the only person who will know you did it is the person you are right now and the person you are slowly becoming.
Those two people matter more than any audience I was trying to impress.
The Actual Mechanics#
What I’ve found—and I say found because I stumbled into it more than I designed it—is that discipline isn’t an act of will. It’s an act of architecture.
You build the environment before you need the willpower. You find the people before you need the accountability. You establish the routine before the difficult days arrive, so that on the difficult days, you’re not deciding anything. You’re just following a path you already laid.
不积跬步，无以至千里；不积小流，无以成江海。
《荀子·劝学》— Without accumulating small steps, one cannot travel a thousand li. Without accumulating small streams, one cannot form rivers and seas.
The calisthenics every morning before armour. Not because anyone is watching. Because I made an agreement with the version of myself who gets up before the rest of the camp stirs, and that version doesn’t negotiate.
The armour polish on evenings with nothing scheduled. Methodical, slow, meditative. The kind of work where your hands know what to do and your mind can settle. I used to find this tedious. Now I find it grounding in a way I don’t have a better word for.
The baking. Yes, the baking. Before dawn, when the guildhall is quiet and smells like cold stone. I started this to manage the anxiety, which I will not admit to more people than strictly necessary. I continue it because I discovered that doing something careful and skilled—measuring, timing, attending to small details—teaches patience in a way no lecture can.
“Discipline is not about forcing yourself. It’s about building a self that doesn’t need forcing.”
That one I arrived at alone, sitting on the kitchen floor at four in the morning with flour on my gauntlets. Some realisations only arrive that way.
The People You Choose#
The most unexpected part: discipline compounds when you’re around people who practise it too.
Not people who perform it. People who practise it.
蓬生麻中，不扶而直；白沙在涅，与之俱黑。
《荀子·劝学》— Mugwort growing among hemp stands straight without any support. White sand mixed with black mud turns black along with it.
Reyneese, who has lived ten thousand years and still chooses patience every single morning, not because it’s effortless but because she’s built ten thousand years of habit around it. Vyrneese, who is technically twenty thousand years old and approaches every new thing—every awkward social moment, every confusing piece of modern technology, every emotion she doesn’t have vocabulary for yet—with the same earnest willingness to try again. Zyneese, who manages the void whispers with a kind of terrible, elegant discipline I am honestly a little in awe of.
Even Brasskeese. Especially Brasskeese, who built an entire life from nothing and runs it with the kind of practical, unsentimental rigour that I’ve spent years trying to approximate with far more words and diagrams.
You become what your environment expects of you, eventually. Not through pressure—through proximity. Through noticing, slowly, that the people around you make the work seem ordinary rather than extraordinary. That consistency stops feeling like sacrifice and starts feeling like simply what people do.
I chose this warband partly by accident and partly by some instinct I hadn’t yet named. I think I was looking for people who would make discipline feel like belonging rather than performance.
I found them.
On Gratitude#
“Gratitude isn’t the reward at the end of the discipline. It’s the fuel in the middle.”
I am grateful for the mornings that are hard and happen anyway. For the routine that holds me when I don’t have the energy to hold myself. For the people who are simply, consistently, reliably there—who don’t require me to be at my best to be welcome.
For the plans that fail beautifully and teach me things the plans that succeed never could.
For the evidence in that journal of failed plans, which is also, if you read it differently, a journal of everything I showed up for anyway.
The discipline I was performing at the beginning—the rigid, audience-dependent, exhausting performance—was protecting something fragile. The discipline I’m trying to build now is different. It’s the kind that doesn’t need protecting because it isn’t trying to prove anything.
问渠哪得清如许？为有源头活水来。
《朱熹·观书有感》— How does the pond stay so clear? Because living water flows ceaselessly from its source.
It’s just the shape of a life I chose. The accumulated weight of small decisions, small habits, small mornings.
The plans never work.
The discipline does.
— Avelreese 艾薇, sometime between the fourth failed formation drill and the discovery that the baking smells better than the victory.