Festina Lente

I feel like I’ve gained a lot of perspective now that I’m twenty-three.

There are a lot of things I want to do. I want to become eloquent and learned. I want to become a painter. I want to become a poet. I want to become a wife, a mother, a wise woman. And I’m now at the perfect age for such aspirational living.

The world is my oyster. 

My last semester of college, I cried in my professor’s office because T.S. Eliot had written “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when he was my age. What had I done? I was running out of time. I was about to graduate and I didn’t have anything to show for it. At the age of twenty-two, I’d done nothing exceptional.

My professor’s response?

Something like, “Vienna waits for you.” 

Another time, I became frustrated during an art class. It was my first time using oil paint and it went horribly. Ready to give it up entirely, I decidedly told my art teacher, “I don’t think I like oil.”

She said, “Madonna, you cannot like anything because you’re not good at anything.”

Until you’ve mastered a medium, you don’t have the freedom to enjoy it. 

I often become preoccupied with products. I did ballet for eight years and never became good at it because I was concerned only with appearances rather than technique. This was a motif in my life—with writing, with photography, with drawing, with painting, with teaching. I preferred to have an immediate, adequate product than take the time to develop something truly great. 

But some things just take time. I’ve learned this with my students. Day in and day out, we review the same things over and over again. Few of my students understand and internalize anything the first time they’re taught it. And that’s okay. We’ll review it again and again and again until they learn.

We rarely learn anything the first time we’re exposed to it. Some things just take time. 

I went to a teaching training in the fall. I was overwhelmed, my classroom was a mess, my students and I were becoming frustrated with one another. One of the last things the presenter told us was, “Remember: you don’t have to change everything to change everything.”

Small changes, when applied consistently over time, can alter everything. 

I'm going on six years of photography and things are different now. I see the camera differently, but I also see differently. I see more than I saw before.

What, then, have I learned in my ripe, old age?

We must learn to be persistent. We must learn to cultivate things, with fervor, over time. We must make haste slowly.