A Little Slow

I just recently I came across a quote that struck a chord within me.

"I am slow to learn and slow to forget that which I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch anything on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out."

To be brutally honest, I am a slow learner. Ask my bride. It was never much of a badge of honor; and a quality that is not highly respected in our culture. No one ever says, "He is a hard worker and he is a slow learner. We love that about him!" Usually the comment is a little less glowing and uttered with a certain amount of frustration. When will he catch on? A mental picture of a football squad waiting impatiently at the end of the agility run waiting for the slow kid to catch up seems to be the best illustration.

But there are a few things that are best learned slowly.

We live in a culture seeking immediate answers to every question. This must be a the root of the dysfunctional political climate. These guys only have 4/6/8 years to fix problems that have festered for decades. And they must fix them with an eye on reelection for the next go around. None of these factors lend themselves to long term reflection, to learning slowly.

Religion is perhaps the gravest offender of trying to learn quickly in the face of blindingly quick societal changes. By the time a book is published on how to do "church" it is out of date, swept away by generations that have already rejected the premise.

Education carries the greatest responsibility, but the rants are common and justified by my teacher-daughters/bride about the disconnect between applying modern solutions to age-old problems. It takes years to implement and like religion, is long past effectiveness by the time it is in the classroom.

A bit of self confession here. I was not a good student. Now my kids can blame me when their kids are a little slow and place blame where it belongs. My running joke all these years was that I finished in the top 75% of my high school class. For a joke to be really funny it has to have an element of truth...
But what I learn is there for good. I was always ashamed of my poor performance in school. Learning for me was a chore. Math is still a mystery to me and the higher math is especially confounding. The softer disciplines I enjoyed, but still struggled because the conclusions by the teachers I found mundane. It wasn't until years later while being tested in a job interview that it was discovered that I scored in the top 2% of the testing group for inductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is taught in school, inductive is not. So I had to sit for additional testing to see how this happened. At least in my head this explained why normal linear logic seemed dull to me. It took me a while to understand the difference. Inductive reasoning also is a long course result, not a step by step process.

My point here is that some learning has to have time to work. Spiritual disciplines (which drive so much of my life) are measured in decades, not moments. Development of moral and ethical approaches to culture or business come about through years of experience and meditation. My bride and kids and kids-in-law all get exasperated when on long distance drives I do not listen to the radio, but sit and "think". It is my slow cooker learning process. Almost all of them want to ride in the other car.

Finally it occurred to me that we need both kinds of learners, slow and fast, deductive and inductive, logical and intuitive, short term and long term. You see I think the "slow learners" are the visionaries, the vision casters. We may not be the best at writing employee handbooks, but we are the best at inspiring the troops to look beyond today's problems to tomorrow's promises.

Godspeed to all the slow folks out there, what we bring to the table may be the best yet. By the way, the quote above was by Abraham Lincoln about himself in the book Team of Rivals. I take some comfort in that.
Don