… Ah.

Servetus was right (telepathically?).

I don’t know how many times I’ve said over the past year that I am blessed in my mentors. I say it again: I am blessed in my mentors.

[There is more than one reason - each vaguely disturbing in its own way - for my continued tendency to talk about my academic work in religious terms. Fodder for a further post.]

This morning’s meeting reminded me to feel blessed, and to hold carefully in mind what that blessing is and how it works.

Thus: a good mentor does not only hold his student’s hand. He faces her bluntly and directly with her task, presents to her the scrambled machinery of her project and asks her, plainly, to make it go. Because she trusts him, because she knows that he is there to teach her and that she has no choice but to learn, she places her delicate (if clumsy), loving (if careless) fingers on the gears and the wires and the ticky thing she doesn’t quite know what to do with, and she fumbles (sometimes gracefully, more often not) until it starts to clack and whirr.

When smoke starts pouring out, her teacher is there with his swift sense to stop the sparks and isolate the problem. Sheepishly, she turns the ticky thing the other way and the whole mess stops clacking and settles into a gentle frrrruummm.

Grace is too much to ask.

Deft mechanics is a better start.

(The next step: Okay. It works. But what does it do?)