Learning That Feels Like Vacation
How to find the beauty in school work
This past April, I was in Italy with my two daughters. My youngest had spent five months working toward a Model UN trip, researching, drafting, and rehearsing the speech she would eventually deliver on water scarcity and human rights. The speech itself was, by every reasonable measure, the academic peak of her year, and I'm still moved by it. I got to “chaperone” (= fly with her, get her to the hotel with her classmates, and then take off with my older one to a small nook on the Amalfi Coast.)
As much as I want to tell you about the lemon trees, granita, and, of course, pasta, the moment I want to write to you about happened later in the trip, on a long afternoon of sightseeing that ended at the Aventine Keyhole.
We had walked something like twenty thousand steps that day, eaten gelato twice, and stopped at almost every Roman water fountain we passed. By the time we wound our way up to the Keyhole, the late afternoon light had softened the city. We ended up at elevation, looking out over much of Rome, with St. Peter's dome rising right in the centre of the view. Strangers were gathered along the wall, friendly and smiling at one another, basking in that golden hour specialness, everyone struck by how stunning it all was. A busker was playing “Sultans of Swing” on guitar in this spectacularly unhurried way; people stopped in their tracks. And the air, somehow and so truthfully, was full of orange blossoms. Every detail, I swear, is utterly honest. Not a work of AI fakery.
It was beautiful in every direction, all at once, and I stood there with my daughters beside me thinking quite seriously about my work. Could learning ever feel like this? Not the trip itself, and not in the sweetness of time-off, or in that specific Europe gorgeousness. But in the feeling? In a full-bodied sense of being held by something lovely while you do whatever it is you're doing.
Sensory Studying Habits
Most of the learners I meet have been taught that the answer is, unequivocally, “no.” That if studying feels pleasant, they're probably not actually studying. That comfort and rigour are at odds, and that the more arduous the experience the more legitimate it must be.
I'd like to push back on that, gently, this season, because the longer I work in this field the less convinced I am that it's true.
I'm increasingly persuaded that beauty has a place inside the studying itself, in the room, on the desk, in the cup beside you, rather than something “earned” at the end of a long stretch of work.
A forty-five-minute window of practice questions can be wrapped in something lovely without becoming any less serious.
Picture a scent that you actually like nearby: a candle, a piece of citrus peel left on the desk, a sprig of rosemary in a small glass of water.
A small view, even: a potted plant where you can see it, a corner of the library where the late-afternoon light falls in a way you noticed once and remembered, a window with a tree in it.
A cup of tea or a snack chosen because it's genuinely delicious to you, rather than chosen as functional fuel.
It isn't an Italian holiday, and it doesn't need to be. It is, more modestly, the willingness to believe that studying can carry its own quieter beauty, and that whatever surrounds the work always shapes how the work goes.
Try it Yourself
So here is a loving invitation for the next two weeks ahead–studying time for many middle and high schoolers. The next time you, or your learner, or your student, or your kid, sits down to do something hard, take ninety seconds beforehand to make the space a little…lovelier. Light a candle, open the window so you can hear spring outside, brew the better tea, or move to the corner where the light is falling sweetly today.
That, to me, is what feel-good, good-feeling learning looks like in practice, with beauty doing some of the sweet, subtle, underneath work of a learning strategy in its own right.
