Beneath the surface

What else could be out there? (Public Record Office of Northern Ireland)

Around March of each year, there's a crop of eighth graders who think that they aren't learning anything.

They are bored and frustrated with their teachers, classmates, and schoolwork. In our tiny homeschool program, they have the luxury of believing that they would feel differently if they went to a traditional public school.

They say that they're ready for high school and just want to be there already. They don't know that they're exactly where they should be. They don't realize that they are learning, deeply, every day. They don't see that their growing sense of discontent is a sign of growth, not stagnation.

It often happens this way: The most important gains are happening beneath the surface. We may be able to point to specific things we are learning or ways in which we are developing skill, but that is not the whole picture. Indeed, we might not be able to see how we've changed until much later. True transformation is massive and gradual, like the shifting of continental plates. Or puberty.

I was reminded of this phenomenon recently when I went to a conference. I took page after page of notes at the sessions I attended. I had dozens of significant conversations with fellow attendees. I was going hard from early morning until late at night.

As a result, I had some valuable takeaways that I was able to articulate: some overarching themes and "big picture" conclusions I had developed.

However, when I woke up on the morning of my flight out of town, I was hit with a much more powerful insight that came seemingly out of nowhere. It didn't appear to be directly related to anything that had been said at the conference or anything that I wrote down. It wasn't connected to my intentional efforts to get the most out of the events I attended.

No, this was an intuitive leap that seemed to be a synthesis of my conference experiences. This was evidence not of conscious learning, but of subconscious transformation.

I had thought I was at the conference to solve a particular problem. My intuitive mind solved a different one without my deliberate input or awareness.

It's not hard to imagine that I, like the eighth graders, might look askance at this mismatch of expectations and reality and think that I wasn't getting what I had paid for. I could dismiss the intuitive leap I had made as something unrelated to the work at hand. I might feel disappointed that I hadn't left the conference with action steps toward achieving the outcome I had been looking for.

However, I did get exactly what I wanted; more than that, I got what I needed. It didn't show up in the exact package I had been expecting, but it was all the more valuable for that.

This is the way it is with so much of the growth we experience. By the time we have grown, we take it for granted. We're searching for signs that it's happened, but we can't find any. It's like looking for our glasses when we're already looking through them.

We will be more content—and probably more effective—if we accept that our most profound growth and development will not be visible to us when it happens. It may be something we only see in retrospect, or we may have to rely on others to reflect it back to us and help us see it.

It's nice to have superficial markers of progress to help us stay motivated. I have those pages of notes from the conference. I have new frameworks I can use to accomplish specific goals. But that is not the whole story. There is more happening beneath the surface, and we can be on the lookout for these more subtle signs, too.

Even when we can't find the indicators of transformation, it's probably still happening. We can just keep going and trust that we'll figure it out eventually. The difference is that, instead of feeling frustrated and hopeless, we can embrace the discomfort of that liminal space prior to our awareness of our own evolution. It makes things a little more tolerable. Maybe we can be a tiny bit more patient when we know what is coming.