Someone once told me that practice is the musician's ultimate act of faith. There is no promise -- only possibility (or, optimistically, probability) -- that one will improve with practice.

For that reason I've always concluded that practice itself must contain some element of play -- some immediate gratification to offset the inevitable dissappointment with progress.

We'd all love to think that we could exist "in the moment" and that our dreams of granduer wouldn't get in the way of enjoying each step along the way. Truth is, though, without those dreams we'd never take the first step.

I think, instead, it's wiser to learn the distinctions between "wishes" and "hopes" or "ambitions".    Wishes get us nowhere. They are childish, not childlike. They are a vapor. Hopes and ambitions will lead us to set goals. They might even lead us to learn where the reasonable point of expectation of attainment is, and how we might best balance that ambition with contentment.

I've tried to start a lot fewer of the sentences of my life with "I wish" and start more of those sentences with reasonable "I will"s.