You can’t rush art.

My kids were 10, 8, 6, and 4 when Toy Story 2 came out.

As kids do, they watched it on repeat, and as kids do (or maybe this was just mine!) they latched on to certain lines and repeated them to each other, laughing hysterically as they imitated the characters.

To this day— at 34, 32, 30, and 28— they still quote a line from Toy Story 2 that rings true in so many ways, and I think of it often in mediation, and even in my personal life, too, when I’m listening to my wife or attempting to counsel one of my Toy-Story-quoting children through their various life challenges.

You can watch the highly-quoted clip here but in summary, a toy repairman is asked by a panicked toy shop owner how long it will take to repair the precious commodity that is Woody.

“You can’t rush art,” the repairman responds.

It’s a simple scene, hardly pivotal, but my kids loved it, and I love it now, too, as I— along with the rest of the Prism team— sit with folks almost everyday in a very “artful” process. To the untrained eye, mediation is a numbers-passing game. But to those of us in the arena— listening, asking, understanding, looking for subtle clues and nuances— it’s an art. And you truly can’t rush it.

You can’t because of the deeply personal and emotional mechanisms at work as a human being takes on objective information, mixes that information with their subjective experience, processes new systems, acronyms, rules & laws for the very first time, all while another set of human beings is seeing the same situation from a completely different angle with a completely different attitude and understanding.

We simply cannot rush this process. It just takes time.

Even when we “know” the answer or “know” what someone “should” do, it doesn’t work if we rush to that part. Did it ever work with your kids when they were struggling? Did they ever just do exactly what your sage wisdom counseled them to do? Mine didn’t.

Their problems were art, which is to say they were unique, individual, and emotional. Their problems were not simply black-and-white tests: this or that, yes or no, right or wrong. It was certainly tempting to view some of their dilemmas this way, but if yours were anything like mine, simply telling them what they “should” do and trying to rush that process of problem-solving never worked.

We can’t rush art.

The alternative is to listen, educate, provide options, and empower others to make their own choice. You can’t rush that process.

It’s art.