“If our scholars would lead more earnest lives, we should not witness those lame conclusions to their ill-sown discourses, but their sentences would pass over the ground like loaded rollers, and not mere hollow and wooden ones, to press in the seed and make it germinate.” (January 5, 1842)

Henry David Thoreau

It is interesting, comforting and frustrating to see the same patterns repeated through history. It was almost 200 years ago when Thoreau made this observation on scholars and critical thinking and yet it remains resonant in our time.

There is no question that our culture values immediacy, not only for things but also for answers. (Is it even worth it to buy something online if we can’t receive it within 2 days?) It often seems like the best answer is the one we come up with first. But what do we miss when we subtract time from thinking and our discourse?