Lente Festina

_{^{Three devices of Bartolomeo Sermartelli. Source: Provenance Online Project and Google Books.}}

Festina Lente

Allow me to introduce this website that will serve as my public journal of observations, ideas, reasoning, and opinion.

Lente Festina, or more commonly Festina Lente (in Latin, word order rarely matters), is often translated as “make haste slowly” and has been adopted as a motto of various influential individuals and families dating back to the Roman emperor Augustus and the Medici Family of Renaissance Florence. It has commonly been taken to enjoin a balance of urgency and diligence. Above are woodcut visualizations of this sentiment captured as a tortoise with a sail on its shell by Italian printer Bartolomeo Sermartelli ca. 1565.

For the purposes of this journal, I will take the Festina Lente admonition to operationally represent a “growth mindset,” in the spirit of Stanford Professor Carol Dweck’s construct, i.e., an evolution and broadening of intellectual capacity, perspective, and talent in a deliberate and continual process.

This phrase is particularly important to me and my family, because we have adopted this philosophy to guide our approach to living life deliberately and to its fullest.

I grew up in a home of modest means, so during my youth I was not exposed to various modes of thinking or activities that one might now associate with a university chancellor. But I made it a goal to live a life of the mind (and of course of the body), never rest on laurels and hold my world view lightly. I, and my entire family, love to learn new things, explore new places, and try new activities. As I say during every commencement season, we do not stop being curious because we grow old, we grow old because we stop being curious. Fortunately, I am constantly surrounded by curious and adventurous people.  

Learning things later in life has not been an inhibition: I learned how to ice skate when I was an assistant professor at UCONN, tackled swimming when I was at Smith College, and mastered the greens and blues of Vermont ski slopes when I landed at the University of Vermont – never easy, and often humbling, tasks.  Although my kids and wife were experts at all of these, I would not let embarrassment get in my way. 

Trained as an engineer, I did not consider myself fully prepared to interpret, understand, and enjoy the world around me. So I try to read constantly, often multiple books at a time and broadly (fiction/non-fiction, english/international writers), making it a practice to try and read a work by each Nobel laureate in literature every year. 

I make haste slowly and patiently and have taken delight in every step along the way.  

In our highly connected and fast paced society, the pervasive tension and conflict we witness online, in politics, on university campuses, and within society as a whole can often be attributed to a deficiency in patience, respect, and willingness to comprehend facts, societal norms, and alternative perspectives.  If a greater number of individuals adopted a growth mindset and approached matters with a measured sense of urgency, we may all benefit.

I sincerely hope that you enjoy this journal and join with me on this adventure of exploration, analysis, and discovery.