I knew things had taken a turn for the worse when I noticed on the shelf of my local supermarket that you can buy a marinade that only takes 30 seconds to do the job. I felt not a little disappointed, I have to admit. It seemed another step to even more things being done at superfast speed. No one seems willing to wait, even for meat or fish to marinade.
To my mind the whole nature of marinating something is about giving the combination of different complementary flavours to meet and connect in a significant way with whatever it has been splashed or brushed onto. After a couple of hours when you cook the marinated item the taste is altogether different from either the ingredients that were combined or the meat or fish’s native flavour. The texture is tender and quite delicious- and worth waiting for, if I do say so myself, coming from a long line of marinaders
Maybe you can see where I am going with this. The work we do at CSA is a mixture of many ‘flavours’ understanding self , understanding the ‘other’, getting sense of the whole system, the energy between supervisee and supervisor to name just some. The nuances of this deeper way of working and connecting builds trust and confidence so that together the work of both supervisee and supervisor has altogether its own uniqueness. This is hard to do without our full hearted attention as we attune our inner ear to hear our own note as much as adjusting to the other’s music , manner and meaning. These don’t happen in the blink of an eye. In fact if we rush it we risk losing sight of what a slowing down of our pace can yield. Shortcuts, quick routes, ‘one click’ service all seem to be pushing us to everything quicker so that we can do even more stuff quicker. Why? We need to sit with the work as an intrinsic piece of the work itself.
There is an often-quoted line about taking time to smell the roses. It is a good line to take to heart before something occurs to make us nostalgic about the roses we may have missed along the way. In truth it is never too late to start paying some slow attention to, especially now in June. Roses are coming into their own pretty soon. You can’t rush a rose outdoors. It’s worth the wait when they arrive in full bloom.
So what are you doing that could use a little marination right now? A little slower cooking in the coaching supervision vessel? And outside it too. What if, for even a little time, you went the slow route rather than the fast? A stroll rather than a race? It can make a nubbly issue a bit more accessible, it may add something that was not there previously enhancing the experience and it must just be a simple pleasure.
Karyn Prentice Assistant Director CSA