Good things take time
MY Gran’s signature baked good was a ginger fluff sponge.
She would serve it to you with a cup of Earl Grey tea.
When you complimented her on it, she would tell you that she buried 30 or 40 sponges in her backyard before mastering the recipe.
I remember asking her as a child why she persisted in learning how to make it. She replied by saying “good things take time”.
Gardening for me is the equivalent of my Gran’s mastery of the ginger fluff sponge.
I enjoy gardening and am on record about how much I love hydrangeas and orchids.
They are relatively easy to grow, bountiful in bloom and spectacular to look at when in flower.
Gardenias, on the other hand, are my floral nemesis.
My gardenia plant, in the past four years, has not produced a single flower despite my enduring efforts.
This year I sought advice from a gardener who has mastered the art of the gardenia and was happy to share her knowledge.
After four years I am delighted to advise that this season I have produced two flowers. Two may not be many but it is definitely more than none.
When I told my gardening friend this “big news” recently she laughed and responded by saying that good things were worth the wait.
She was right. I was thrilled with my two flowers, taking the time to enjoy their beauty and their fragrance every day that they bloomed. And while the expense and the time of tending to them could not, on any objective reckoning, be said to have been a good investment, the joy of the long-awaited minor achievement was wonderful.
By stark contrast, our youngest child Georgia, in the lead up to a recent birthday, wanted some new summer clothes.
I said to her that we could go shopping on the upcoming weekend at Westfield and she could try on various pieces of clothing and work out what she wanted, having decided what looked good on her and what fitted her well.
Her response to this seemingly old-fashioned suggestion and delay of a few days was to take the family iPad and look up the website of her favourite store.
She then browsed through the clothes on their website, took a screenshot of each of the items she wanted (having checked they had them in her size) and sent me an iMessage of the screenshots.
When I received the iMessage, part of me was impressed by her organisational skills and her mastery of the online world at the age of seven.
Part of me was terrified by the exact same set of skills.
And another part was sad that my plan for a lovely afternoon shopping and chatting with her had been erased by a combination of her impatience and the reality of her world that uses technology to solve problems with speedy solutions.
In Georgia’s world, good things should never take time.
Shopping is one thing, but acquiring non retail-therapy-based skills is another.
Many friends and family members in recent years have relayed stories of their children quitting sports or music lessons almost immediately after starting them due to this same generational impatience.
Their child’s frustration at their inability to immediately swing a golf club like Ryan Ruffels, or swing a tennis racquet like Ash Barty, or play a beautiful concerto after their first piano lesson is the reason why they had ceased to participate.
While I acknowledge that very few of our children will ever be Ash Barty or Ryan Ruffels, I do wonder whether our children’s generational expectation of immediacy in learning a new skill may ultimately deprive them of the joy you experience when you finally acquire a level of competency in that new skill.
How do we assist our children to find balance in the world in which they are growing up?
In their world, technology is used to solve problems, reduce the speed that things take and connect them with the world.
This must be balanced against the human reality of learning through doing, absorbing information over time and enduring the simple repetition of a task or action so muscle memory can develop and you can improve.
Finding that balance may well be one of the greatest challenges our children’s generation faces. I hope for them that it is resolved, that they too get to smell the gardenias or experience the joy of a ginger fluff sponge. Rachel Schutze is a principal lawyer at Gordon Legal, wife and mother of three. [Ed’s note: Ms Schutze is married to Corio MP Richard Marles.]