Why Do Some Kinds of Learning Refuse to Be Hurried?

For most of my life I believed that if something mattered enough, I should be able to learn it more quickly. Read another book. Work harder. Stay later. Find a better teacher. Become more disciplined. Speed felt like virtue. Then I trained as a group analyst.

The training lasted nearly a decade. It unfolded alongside work, family life and clinical practice, yet somehow never seemed to move at the pace I wanted. Whenever I thought I was finally getting ahead, something would happen to slow me down. My instinct was always the same. Read more. Think harder. Become busier. Surely there had to be a way of arriving sooner.

Yet again and again the answer seemed to be the opposite. Slow down. Wait. Stay with what I didn’t yet understand.

At first I experienced this as frustrating. Increasingly, I have come to think it may not be accidental. It has left me wondering whether some kinds of learning simply refuse to be hurried. This isn’t because these tasks are especially difficult, but because they are asking something fundamentally different of us.

There are many forms of learning that do reward efficiency. We can learn anatomy more quickly. We can memorise legislation, vocabulary or diagnostic criteria more efficiently. We can become technically more competent through deliberate practice.

Those forms of knowledge accumulate.

But there are other forms of learning that seem to obey entirely different rules:

Learning to become trustworthy cannot be accelerated.

Learning to recognise our own blind spots cannot be accelerated.

Learning to tolerate uncertainty cannot be accelerated.

Learning to hear what another person is actually saying, rather than what we expected them to say, cannot be accelerated.

This kind of learning depends less upon acquiring information than upon being changed by experience. It asks something more uncomfortable of us than understanding. It asks us to discover that we are not quite the person we imagined ourselves to be.

One of the phrases often heard in group analysis is that it takes a group to run a group.

When I first heard it, I thought it sounded unnecessarily cumbersome. Surely, after enough years of experience, an individual clinician should eventually be able to think well enough alone. Surely wisdom was something one gradually accumulated until it eventually belonged to the individual. Over time I realised that the phrase is not really about competence; It is about unconsciousness.

The longer I have worked with groups, the less convinced I have become that our greatest limitation is ignorance. More often it is our inability to recognise what has disappeared from view. We all disappear from ourselves in ways we cannot detect. Left entirely alone, we become increasingly convinced that our perspective is complete precisely because the parts we cannot see have disappeared along with everyone who might have noticed them.

This is one of the paradoxes of experience.

We often imagine expertise leading to greater certainty. Yet genuine experience frequently seems to produce the opposite. It becomes easier to recognise how partial every understanding is, and how much we continue to rely upon other minds to help us think.

Other people do not simply offer different opinions. They make our absences visible.

And that kind of learning has its own pace.

It asks us not simply to think more, but to remain in relationship long enough for reality to surprise us.

Perhaps that is why Aesop’s The Hare and the Tortoise has stayed with me for so many years.

As a child I understood it as a story about determination defeating laziness. Later I thought it was a warning against arrogance. The hare could have won had she simply remained awake. Now I wonder whether the story is asking a quieter question.

What if the hare’s mistake is not that she falls asleep, but that she believes she can afford to?

She assumes there is nothing left she needs to notice. She mistakes speed for mastery. Having moved so quickly, she imagines the race has already been understood. Sleep becomes more than rest. It becomes a symbol of certainty itself: the conviction that reality has no further claims to make upon her.

The tortoise has no such luxury.

Every movement requires contact with the ground. She cannot leap over the landscape. She can only meet it. Every step is an encounter with what is actually there.

I sometimes wonder whether that is true of psychological development more generally. We often speak about insight as though it were something that happens inside the mind alone. We read another book, attend another course or develop another theory, and imagine that understanding has therefore deepened. Sometimes it has.

But sometimes our ideas have simply outrun our experience.

The deepest forms of learning seem to require repeated encounters with reality. They ask us to remain in the room after certainty has dissolved. To stay in relationship long enough for our first impressions to become second thoughts, and our second thoughts to become something closer to wisdom. Perhaps that is why therapy takes time. Perhaps it is why good supervision cannot simply be compressed into technique.

Perhaps it is why the best teams are not those that move the fastest, but those that can remain curious when things stop making sense.

None of this is an argument against efficiency. Speed has its place. There are many situations in life where swift action is exactly what is required.

But there are other journeys where moving too quickly changes the nature of the journey itself. The point is no longer simply to arrive. It is to become someone capable of seeing what could not previously be seen.

This, I think, is one of the gifts group analysis has given me. Not just a different way of understanding groups, but a different relationship with learning itself.

I still notice the old impulse. I still find myself looking for the shortcut, wondering whether I could somehow arrive sooner if only I worked a little harder.

Then I remember the tortoise. She never loses contact with the ground beneath her feet. I remember some journeys refuse to be hurried because their purpose is not simply to take us somewhere else.

Their purpose is to change the person who is making the journey.