With Enough Time, The Shortest Distance Between Two Points Is Me

I was 10 when I had my first chance to be better at this, less bitter and injured, sitting in my 5th grade Catholic school drawing class in Asturias, Spain.

I’d been given an assignment to sketch as precisely as possible a detailed lion’s head on a very large sketch pad. For our only reference, we were given the original on a sheet of paper. It must have been the metric system equivalent of a standard 8.5” by 11”.

The version I drew was almost too perfect. Other students in the class already thought I was tracing it directly from the reference sheet, because that’s how I’d taught myself to draw with accurate detail the year before. Never mind how much bigger mine was.

Sharp as they were, these kids didn’t always do numbers or measurements well.

The nun who taught our class on the other hand had just one critique. My lines were too deep and tension filled, she said in her whip crack crisp Spanish.

It seemed obvious at the time. In a strange new land, I was often quiet and emotional with surplus to hide. Hadn’t spoken a word of Spanish the entire summer. I was never taught it by the half of my family who spoke it at home back in NYC.

So I just listened. To everyone. Very intently, every day, for 3 months until my first school year started.

Then, I turned it around on them. Spoke better than the natives, acing every test and class, and somehow still making friends easily.

Maybe the way I bought the other kids off with large bags of candy every school day helped. I would walk down the hill to the candy store in the nearest town during our long siesta style lunch breaks. The Dollar to Peseta exchange rate was great for a young American kid who didn’t have to work for it. And the cost of food, infinite varieties of sugar included, was very favorable just a short time after the 40 years of brutal dictatorship under “El Generalísimo Francisco Franco.”

No surprise, I concentrated everything I felt and couldn’t share with anyone into each pencil stroke. It had only been 6 years at that point since my father died. One year since my mother moved me to Spain, with my brother, his father, and her – far away from the rest of our family. And a few terrifying months at most since she had her first psychotic break.

The critique from the Spanish nun stung, but I knew even then it was temporary. What came next wasn’t.

To teach me a new drawing skill I could pick up quickly, she grabbed an eraser and began to show me how to add light strokes of negative space, subtracting from the sketch where I had only thought of adding. Then she made a mistake. One large sloppy gash of an eraser stroke cut through the carefully made sketch I’d hid my emotion into.

Looking back at the memory of it this morning, something clicked: that’s when I stopped drawing.

It also struck me for the first time, so many years later, that it’s obvious now what I can learn from this.

When I invest all of myself into something, with ample bonuses of absurdity and luck, I can do things that feel pretty special. Anyone can.

Even then, it’s ok to have it fall apart at the last moment… I don’t have to be bitter about it. I don’t have to give up.

It sounds so simple it’s borderline stupid in my ears even now. “I don’t have to give up.” I don’t have to do anything in reaction to “all of that effort and care going to waste when it was almost complete”.

I get to do it again. To experience that joy of working out something complicated and intricate. It’s another puzzle to play with. And, there’s an extra bonus round!

I get to build on all of the strength I gained from the things learned along the way, making the next time, and the next time, and the next time easier still.

Whether at the age of 10, or decades later, it’s a good lesson to remember.