While at school, we hardly ever understand what it is to learn something or what learning really is. As we all know, education is different from learning. Education is getting a degree while learning is not. But when I got the difference, I just wanted to jump forward and skip all the boring parts- the parts where it’s a struggle to show up. I think it may be the case for most of us here.

Jason Pargin, novelist and former executive editor of cracked.com, writes here:

I think The Karate Kid ruined the modern world. Not just that movie, but all of the movies like it (you certainly can’t let the Rocky sequels escape blame). Basically any movie with a training montage.
You know what I’m talking about; the main character is very bad at something, then there is a sequence in the middle of the film set to upbeat music that shows him practicing. When it’s done, he’s an expert.
When I am fired as the Editor of Cracked and run out of ideas for penis-based horror novels, I want to write this up as a self-help book, probably titled Fuck The Karate Kid: Why Life is So Much Harder Than We Think, by Dr. David Wong. I also have to become a doctor at some point.
It seems so obvious that it actually feels insulting to point it out. But it’s not obvious. Every adult I know–or at least the ones who are depressed–continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the first time and are shocked to find it costs way, way more than you thought). Only it’s with effort. It’s Effort Shock.

So true, right? The effort shock when we realise that it is going to take longer than you think can be crushing. To do anything worthwhile is going to take a while. But later on in the piece, he goes on to endorse the popular ten thousand rule from Malcom Gladwell’s bestseller Outliers. I have a lot of issues with it but apart from that, it’s just inaccurate and has been debunked by many. But it shouldn’t let you off the hook for practice. That is a given but here’s the thing I have been curious about: To learn slowly or in other words, to learn with patience.

In this article titled ‘The power of patience’, then professor of history of art and architecture at Harvard, Jennifer L. Roberts writes:

The deliberate engagement of delay should itself be a primary skill that we teach to students. It’s a very old idea that patience leads to skill, of course—but it seems urgent now that we go further than this and think about patience itself as the skill to be learned. Granted—patience might be a pretty hard sell as an educational deliverable. It sounds nostalgic and gratuitously traditional. But I would argue that as the shape of time has changed around it, the meaning of patience today has reversed itself from its original connotations. The virtue of patience was originally associated with forbearance or sufferance. It was about conforming oneself to the need to wait for things. But now that, generally, one need not wait for things, patience becomes an active and positive cognitive state. Patience no longer connotes disempowerment—perhaps now patience is power.

 As a part of the art history course, she used to make her students look at a single piece of painting for three hours in a museum without doing any prior research. This was always met with resistance but at the end of the exercise, the students are almost always surprised at what they learnt about the painting.

She continues to write,

The art historian David Joselit has described paintings as deep reservoirs of temporal experience—“time batteries”—“exorbitant stockpiles” of experience and information. I would suggest that the same holds true for anything a student might want to study at Harvard University—a star, a sonnet, a chromosome. There are infinite depths of information at any point in the students’ education. They just need to take the time to unlock that wealth. And that’s why, for me, this lesson about art, vision, and time goes far beyond art history. It serves as a master lesson in the value of critical attention, patient investigation, and skepticism about immediate surface appearances. I can think of few skills that are more important in academic or civic life in the twenty-first century.

 Time batteries, I love that. When we speak about the power of art, it’s precisely this that we are referring to. The embodied energy that is there for anyone’s taking if they care to be patient – and a little obsessive. Obsession and patience, I believe that is a great recipe for anyone who wants to be a learner for life.

What does it mean to look at a single frame -a film, a photograph, a painting or anything- that speaks to us for hours on end? To use one’s imagination to wonder about all the stories behind a single piece’s existence. And that temporal experience is not knowledge for knowledge’s sake. What is the point of knowledge if it can’t serve any real purpose in our lives? I believe art can also be spoken of in utilitarian terms.

We can do research later but first, as the professor said, let us cast our attention to noticing things first.

Peace and grace,
Nikhil.