Showing your mom how to use her phone for the fifth time? She showed you how to use a spoon about five hundred times.
STILLNESS
WHAT THIS MEANS
The ledger already ran the other direction for years, mostly before you could remember any of it. Teaching is repetition; that is not a flaw in the person learning, it is what the process is made of, and nobody counted while they were doing it for you. Somebody sat through five hundred rounds of the spoon without a sigh.
Sit down next to her instead of taking the phone out of her hands. Go one step at a time, let her press it, and write the steps on paper for the sixth time. The paper is the part that actually helps.
A QUESTION TO SIT WITH
What patience did your parents spend on you unnoticed?
MORE IN PATIENCE & TIMING
- Bird watchers know it: move fast and you’ll see nothing. Sit still long enough and the whole tree wakes up.
- Surfers spend most of the session sitting on the board. The wave they catch is the reward for all that sitting.
- A Rubik’s cube looks worse halfway through than it did scrambled. Messy middles aren’t failures.
Free, with nothing to buy inside it.