Good things come to those who wait

There is a famous scene in the 1950s American television show “I Love Lucy”. Lucy and her friend Ethel go to work for a chocolate factory. They must wrap Bon Bons that are moving along a conveyor belt.

At first the belt moves at a reasonable speed, with Lucy and Ethel managing to wrap each sweet. But as the belt moves faster and faster, high comedy ensues. Bon Bon madness erupts as Lucy and Ethel stuff chocolates into their hats, their mouths, their bras.

They manage to deceive their supervisor, a hard-nosed task master who, believing all is well, yells out, “Speeeeed it up!” to the conveyor belt operator behind a screen. Lucy and Ethel reel backwards, aghast.

Sometimes, when I am facing expectations in my role as a lecturer of English to ‘ create new programmes’, ‘increase throughput’, ‘streamline provision’, or consolidate office space, I feel like Lucy and Ethel.

Higher Education here in Ireland seems bent on proving its worth to a society ever more fearful of losing the competitive edge.

But, as a lover of the written word, I seek inspiration from the ‘throughput’ of writers who knew their craft, understood their own mission statements.

I think of young Anne Frank, locked away in her family’s secret annex in Nazi-occupied Holland. Unable to leave the house, she produced some of the finest and most thoughtfully genuine prose of the 20th century.

Far from a spontaneously composed, chronologically unfolding narrative of her experience in the attic, Anne’s diary, called Kitty, was carefully crafted, diligently revised, and studiously edited over the duration of her confinement.

She intended the work for publication, and she wanted it to be worthy of the suffering it reflected. She wrote: “I want to go on living even after I’m dead”. Anne’s two years in the small rooms of the annex offered opportunity for constant reflection, if little else.

The fruits of quiet concentration are evident as well in the verse of 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, a more voluntary recluse, who wrote: “This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me, and went on to “select her own society” for the remainder of her writing life.

She valued ‘concentration’ in every sense: her most productive period of composition was in her later years, after she had withdrawn socially. Her verse itself is verbally concentrated, every utterance a distillation of ‘amazing sense’ from ‘ordinary meanings’. She wrote:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee One clover, and a bee And reverie. The reverie alone will do, if bees are few.

For Dickinson, rumination is the essence of creativity. Reverie, she insisted, is germination itself. A life of reverie? A field of blossoms.

I remember a bestseller on the book shelves years ago called If You Haven’t Got the Time to Do It Right, When Will you Find the Time to Do it Over? Such a good question.

But to do anything well, or beautifully, or poetically, or efficiently, contemplation is required, not just execution. In so many sectors of society, higher education included, we are expecting ourselves to do more with less. Very likely, we will succeed.

We will do more. But wouldn’t it be better to do, well, better? We talk a lot in our times about sustainability. I hope that the history e-books will come to tell of how our generation gave rise to The Great Age of Sustainability.

Rome really wasn’t built in a day. Guinness is right that good things come to those who wait.

Let us not mistake education for manufacturing, students for widgets. Let us not get carried away by ‘efficiencies’. One day this Emerald Isle of ours will harvest its clover in a blissfully long Celtic twilight and for all the world to see.

* Sue Norton is a lecturer in English in the College of Arts and Tourism at the Dublin Institute of Technology.