Tag Archives: Patience and Practice

Seeing Clearly Comes with a Price

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“New ideas pass through three periods: it is ridiculed, it is opposed, and it is regarded as self-evident.” — Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). German philosopher noted for his unsentimental view of progress and human behavior.

Epiphany! Of course! Tomorrow. One day away. But my mind keeps circling back to something that awakened me earlier, at the very start of December.

My fruitcakes, the last of the season, were in the oven. My kitchen was redolent with the aroma of butter and cinnamon and nutmeg and allspice and peach brandy. I was doing the cleanup of a gargantuan undertaking—fruitcakes that each weighed in at seven pounds, mind you—and I had two of them humming away in the oven. I started putting the mixer away, the hand mixer I used to turn the eggs into a proud, towering foam before folding them into the creamed butter and sugar. It was a choreography I had learned by muscle memory: beat, fold, lift, repeat, hope.

I looked at the hand mixer sitting on the countertop and could hardly believe what I saw. This poor old thing has been with me through decades of batter and holiday chaos, but apparently I had never actually looked at it with eyes as sharp as they were that day. Suddenly the vents and seams—those tiny nooks and crannies no one examines unless a guest baker is coming—were showing off little smudges of dried batter and a faint dusting of past Christmases. Nothing alarming, nothing unsanitary—just the honest residue of a well-loved tool that’s worked harder than most small appliances ever consent to. And I stood there wondering how on earth I had missed all that before.

Just as I was about to recover, I cast my eyes on the spoon rests—newer, used daily, and supposedly spotless because I wash them every single night. And yet, was that dust I saw? A faint constellation of tiny specks clinging to the cobalt glaze like stars that refused to set? My ordinary eyes never noticed a thing, but these new lenses seem determined to reveal every whisper of the world I’ve been breezing past. It’s not dirt. It’s not neglect. It’s just life—settling lightly, quietly, invisibly—until suddenly I was noticing more than I had bargained for.

Frankly, nothing in the kitchen escaped the spotlight.

That’s when it finally dawned on me: this wasn’t about cleanliness, or aging eyes, or domestic delusion. It was about wearing something new long enough for it to start teaching me how to look.

That “something new,” I realized, was my new Meta AI glasses. They’re ordinary enough at first glance. Dark frames. Familiar weight on the bridge of my nose. However, embedded in them is a quiet intelligence: a camera that sees what I see, microphones that listen, and a system capable of answering questions, identifying objects, translating text, and retrieving information without my ever reaching for a phone. They don’t replace my vision. They sit beside it, augmenting my attention rather than overpowering it. Impressive? Yes—but not seamless. Not yet.

In that moment, standing in my kitchen, I realized they’d already begun doing their real work—literally and metaphorically. They hadn’t changed the world overnight, but they had changed me: how closely I looked, how much I noticed, how quickly I drew conclusions. And if I’m honest, I wanted them to be everything to me right then and there. I wanted the future to arrive fully formed, yesterday. I wanted instant mastery, seamless magic, no friction at all.

Of course, great advances never work that way. Even these remarkable glasses come with limits, blind spots, and moments of awkward silence. They require setup. Patience. Practice. Updates. They demand that the human wearing them slow down long enough to learn how to use them well. And that’s when it struck me: what I was experiencing wasn’t disappointment. It was a learning curve.

And that, it turns out, is nothing new.

Every major human advance arrives this way. First, we notice it. Then we misunderstand it. We expect too much of it too quickly, and then—inevitably—we bump into its limits. Those limits can feel like failure, but history suggests otherwise. They are simply the cost of learning how to live with something new.

When humans first began cultivating crops and domesticating animals, the breakthrough wasn’t just agricultural—it was psychological. Trusting stillness over movement felt risky. Seeds didn’t always sprout. Weather didn’t always cooperate. Settling in one place meant betting survival on forces no one fully understood. Over time, though, farming reshaped daily life, social structures, and governance itself. The curve was steep, but what followed was surplus, stability, and civilization.

The printing press brought a different shock. Identical words, multiplied endlessly, unsettled centuries of authority built on scarcity and control. People feared heresy, misinformation, and the loss of trusted intermediaries. Literacy spread unevenly. Regulation lagged behind invention. And yet, once the dust settled, knowledge belonged to more people than ever before. Public discourse—messy, noisy, vital—was born.

Industrialization asked humans to relearn work itself. Machines didn’t just replace muscle; they redefined time. Clocks ruled lives. Cities grew faster than systems designed to protect the people who powered them. Fear followed—of accidents, exploitation, obsolescence. But so did labor laws, safety standards, and new ideas about rights and responsibility. The curve bent slowly, but it bent.

Even space exploration followed the same pattern. Leaving Earth wasn’t just a technical achievement. It was an existential one. Seeing our planet from orbit changed how we understood borders, fragility, and shared fate. Early failures were deadly. Political tensions ran high. But from that uncertainty came satellites, navigation systems, and weather forecasting. Today, those quiet technologies are woven so tightly into our daily lives that we forget they were once unimaginable.

The digital age repeated the pattern yet again. Invisible files. Disembodied conversations. A world “online” but nowhere in particular. We worried—rightly—about privacy, fraud, misinformation, and attention itself. Still, we learned. We adapted. We built guardrails, however imperfectly. Entire industries transformed, and daily life reshaped itself around screens and networks.

Seen this way, AI doesn’t stand apart from history. Instead it stands squarely within it. What feels different now is simply proximity. This time, the new tool touches something we assumed was uniquely ours: perception, judgment, cognition. No wonder the learning curve feels personal. No wonder I felt it standing there in my kitchen, staring at a hand mixer I thought I already knew.

The common denominator in every one of these moments isn’t the technology itself. It’s us. It’s our impatience, our hope, our tendency to expect the future to arrive fully baked, and our equally reliable ability to adapt once we slow down long enough to learn how to look again.

In reality, though, seeing clearly has always come with a price. But history suggests it also comes with a gift: the chance to notice what was already there—and to decide, deliberately, what to do next. With AI, that choice feels newly charged. The learning curve may follow a familiar pattern, but the pace does not. Our impatience is sharper. Our expectations louder. We want these systems to do more for us now—think better, decide faster, anticipate more—long before we’ve fully reckoned with what it means to share our cognitive space with machines.

Whether we name it or not, we are entering a moment of profound convergence. Tools no longer merely extend our hands; they begin to extend our judgment, our memory, our voice. This will unfold whether we welcome it or resist it. Choosing not to look will not slow it down. The real risk is not that we move too fast, but that we move forward without paying attention—without asking what is being gained, what is being lost, and who is being asked to adapt first.

And so I found myself back where I’d started—standing in my kitchen, my Meta AI glasses still resting on my nose, fruitcakes humming away in the oven, spice and brandy thick in the air. The mixer was wiped down. The spoon rests rinsed and set straight. Nothing dramatic had changed. The room was the same size. The work was the same work. But I was different, if only by a degree or two. Wearing something that asked me to see differently had taught me to pause before assuming I already knew what I was seeing.

That, I think, is what every learning curve ultimately asks of us. Not mastery on day one. Not perfection. But attention. A willingness to see more than we saw yesterday, and to accept that clarity often arrives before comfort—especially when the future is arriving faster than we expected.

As we enter the first full week of 2026, may we resist the urge to demand that the AI future hurry up and behave. May we recognize the wobble for what it is: not failure, but infancy. And may we remember that while we cannot stop this moment, we can choose how fully we inhabit it—eyes open, hands steady, and minds engaged.

Here’s to clearer sight, steadier hands, and the faith that, given time and care, we’ll learn how to use what AI offers us without surrendering what makes us human.

A Sweet Recipe for Life

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“Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.”

—Epictetus (c. 50–135 CE; Greek Stoic philosopher whose teachings emphasized the importance of self-discipline, resilience, and living in harmony with nature.)

Simple things in life make me smile: snowflakes kissing my face, the scent of fresh sourdough bread baking in the oven, and even the gentle symphony of Ruby’s snoring as she sleeps. However, of all the joys that I treasure—small and big—one that stands out is the straightforward act of sharing: ideas, consolation, time well spent together, meals at the table, breads, cakes, and yes, even recipes. Those moments of connection take me beyond myself toward something truly meaningful.

Recently, I shared my mother’s celebrated fruitcake recipe, and in the act of sharing, I savored an unexpected, sweet reward of my own.

I passed the recipe on to a friend exactly as my mother had passed it on to me.

It starts with all the ingredients. It’s a hefty cake with four pounds of cherries, golden raisins, pineapple, and pecans. For the batter, it has just enough to hold the fruit and nuts together, but even then it has a half dozen jumbo eggs, a pound of butter, and a magical blend of lemon juice, vanilla, freshly grated nutmeg, cinnamon, and allspice. All of those ingredients can be measured and weighed with perfect precision. But my mother put in another ingredient that knows neither measure nor weight: an extra dose of love.

After the ingredients, the recipe moves through all the steps. Lining the cake pan with parchment. Packing the mixture into the pan to achieve an even distribution of fruits, nuts, and batter. Baking at a low temp with a tray of water in the bottom of the oven.

Once the cake is done, it gets decorated with flowers made of pineapple wedges and cherries and returned to the oven for a few minutes, so the decorations will stick. When it emerges from the oven, another phase of the process begins. The cake cools on a rack until it can be turned out onto a towel, wrapped, and left to rest overnight, as if preparing for the transformative journey ahead.

The next morning, the ritual of wrapping and aging begins. A sheet of Saran Wrap is spread out on the counter, ready to embrace the cake. On top of it, cheesecloth soaked just right—not too wet, not too dry—with peach brandy is carefully arranged. The cake is placed at the center, a treasure waiting to be preserved. My mother’s instructions are precise:

“Fold the cheesecloth snugly around the cake, then do the same with the Saran Wrap, ensuring every inch is covered.”

Finally, the whole package is encased in heavy-duty foil, its armor for the weeks of aging ahead:

“Store in a cool room for two weeks,” her notes instruct. “Then carefully open, refresh the cheesecloth with more brandy, and rewrap.”

The process is repeated, patience layered upon patience, as the cake soaks in the flavors, deepening and maturing over time. Only then—after weeks of care and tending and extra doses of love all along the way—is the fruitcake ready for the refrigerator, where it will wait for its moment to be gifted or served.

Her final tip is practical, but it carries a poetic truth:

“The cake slices best when cold but eats best at room temperature.”

It’s a nod to the reward of patience—how time and care yield something truly remarkable.

If it sounds like a daunting recipe, it is. It’s not for the faint-of-heart baker. In fact, when I was getting ready to share the recipe, I was in the midst of baking fruitcakes myself. It occurred to me that perhaps I should take some photographs and include them beside the corresponding steps. I changed my mind, though, because my friend is an accomplished baker, and I figured that her bake would be as right as it could ever be for a first attempt.

After all, my mother didn’t get it right the first time. That’s why she spent decades perfecting her perfect fruitcake—a recipe honed with precision, patience, and a deep understanding of the process. Her fruitcake, like so much in life, wasn’t about instant gratification. It was about the slow, steadfast practice of doing something right, ingredient by ingredient, step by step, until it was as close to perfection as she could make it.

The lesson my mother’s fruitcake offers goes far beyond baking. It reminds me how patience and practice are at the heart of everything worth doing well. The recipe might call for precise measurements, but the same principle applies to so many aspects of life, where consistent effort, persistence, and time are the ingredients for success.

Take education, for instance. Mastering any skill—whether reading, writing, or ‘rithmetic—demands patience from both the student and the teacher. As an educator, I’ve seen firsthand how true understanding doesn’t come overnight. It’s built step by step, through trial, error, and those quiet “aha” moments that can’t be rushed. Teaching requires not only patience but also an extra dose of love: the care to meet students where they are, to encourage them when they stumble, and to celebrate their victories, big and small.

The same holds true in career paths. When I reflect on my time as a civil servant and later as an educator, I see how persistence shaped my journey. A fulfilling career isn’t something you stumble into—it’s built through detours and unexpected challenges that teach you resilience. Like fruitcake, careers need time to mature. And they need love: the passion for what you do, the commitment to make a difference, and the willingness to pour yourself into your work even when progress feels slow.

In personal goals, too, patience and practice are essential. Whether it’s pursuing health, creative aspirations, or even learning a new skill, success rarely comes in leaps and bounds. It’s incremental. It’s showing up, day after day, even when progress feels slow. And the secret ingredient? Love for the process itself—finding joy in the small victories, the moments when you feel yourself growing, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing you’re doing your best.

Relationships may be where patience and practice are most important of all. Building strong connections with others takes time, effort, and a willingness to grow alongside each other. Forgiveness, understanding, and communication are not one-time efforts; they’re practices we return to over and over. Like a fruitcake wrapped and aged, the best relationships deepen and become richer over time, with care, attention, and those extra doses of love that make them truly sweet.

Finally, spirituality. If there’s one area of life where practice and patience are truly a lifelong journey, it’s in connecting with something greater than ourselves. Clarity and peace often come in whispers, not shouts. Spiritual growth is about showing up—whether in prayer, meditation, or simply being present—and trusting that the sweetness will unfold when the time is right. I think of moments in my own life when answers came slowly, like the fruitcake aging in brandy, revealing their richness only after time and quiet reflection. And through it all, love is the thread: love for the journey, love for the questions as much as the answers, and love for the connection that binds us to the greater whole.

Each of these areas reminds me that, like my mother’s fruitcake, the things we cherish most in life aren’t created in a moment. They require steady hands, careful tending, and those extra doses of love that infuse meaning into every step of the process. Who would have thought that, all along, my mother was passing down a sweet recipe for life?