I apologize for how late in the month you're receiving this installment, but I spent the second half of the month on the longest real vacation of my life in Italy and France. I know what you're thinking, "I'm glad she got to do that, but how will she relate that experience this month to our Academy?"
The experience has reminded me, fondly, of the international meetings of the 1990s and 2000s, but that's not the connection I'm proposing. Instead, it's Try Something New. Kurt (Zadnik, managing Editor of Optometry and Vision Science since 1996) and I traveled with old friends (well, ones we've known a long time, not nonagenarians) who planned the trip. All four of us have had to be willing to Try Something New. I'm not much of a sightseer, but Michangelo's David in the Florence Accademia changed how I think about museums, forever. Our friends don't much like feeling like tourists, so taking a goofy pizza making class was a (fun) stretch for them.
As you make your plans for Academy Phoenix 2012, think about stretching yourself. If you always attend glaucoma lectures, for example, think about hitting the glaucoma posters in the Scientific Program too. If you never miss a certain speaker's annual lecture on keratoconus but realize you could tell all his anecdotes because you've heard it so often, try a new, young speaker on a similar topic. If you avoid binocular vision-related sessions of every variety because you just never liked the topic in optometry school, dip your toes in the waters of the Binocular Vision, Pediatric, and Perceptual Optometry's symposium. Branch out. Try Something New.
There's one problem with my proposal. Adult learners want to master a new skill quickly. We want to know everything the teacher knows in an hour or two. We have a hard time giving anything novel a chance. I read something recently that posited that a real expert spends most of her time trying to master a new skill rather than practicing one already mastered (or is that "mistressed"?)
As we moved from Italy to France last week, I got it into my head that I was going to start a watercolor travelogue of little pictures or images from our trek. The obsessive search for materials began. I bought pencils, an eraser, and marker in Florence. I gestured in vain at a "peints" sign outside a shop at the foot of Mont Ventoux in France. We tried to find a shop near Avignon in Provence that a local described. Finally, in a grocery store, I bought a child's paint set, much to the relief of my traveling companions who were tired of hearing me whine. I sat out on the patio of our lodging in Tavel and sketched and painted a little wine glass filled with the local rose, a local wine label logo, and a tiny bunch of grapes that were imprinted on a cork left on the table. (Go to the Academy's Facebook page now to view my effort.
See? They're amateurish. I have to keep trying and practice. They're not the Sistine Chapel, but I did Try Something New.
