Cecelia (not her real name) was a dual-credit student between the college and a local high school. Granted, she was young, but she was also an honor student among her peers. She had 90 minutes to complete the assignment: a single leaf. record intricate detail. use graphite. I prefaced the assignments with a standard—“we are not looking for masterpieces, just a careful seeing and recording.”
Fifteen minutes into the allotted time, she was texting. She would go back to the drawing as a kind of token of sincerity and finally, after about 30 minutes, seemed unable to bear the boredom any longer and informed me she had finished her work and needed to leave.
She handed me her sketchbook, “I’m done, wanna see it?” She had created a credible outline of the leaf and, apparently overwhelmed by the complexity, did quick child-like scribbles within the boundaries. Scribbles are not awful, just not what was assigned.
The value of this example is not in ridicule, but rather my observance of the difficulty and resistance to slowing and truly seeing. The application extends broadly.
Carl Honore’s In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed convincingly speaks of the beauty of slowness in a variety of arenas including eating, work, medicine, and sex….citing a new hunger for slowing as a “message people want to hear.” He includes Frederick Nietzsche’s detection of a growing culture “of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to get everything done at once.”
Cecelia is a fractal—a reduced-sized copy--of the whole of her surrounding culture. She is bored with what is and she scribbles.
Deliberate slowing aborts the constant movement toward things that glisten for attention. I find it distinctly uncomfortable. It feels irresponsible to disobey time or the siren call to action.But I am seeing that when I concede to slowness, there is a direct correlation to increased awareness and interest in life as it is.....and less of my own scribbling.
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