Quote of the Day: Willa Cather on Education

We’re taught that peace is the goal and turbulence is the detour. But what if the detour is where the real education happens, and peace is simply where we take notes? Willa Cather punctures our preference for the pleasant with a bracing reminder: “There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”

Calm is not a vacation from growth; it’s the laboratory. When life quiets down, the mind finally has room to observe itself, how quickly we judge, how easily we forget, what we’re grateful for when nothing is on fire. In stillness, we learn the slow skills: perspective, attentiveness, the kind of humility that comes from listening longer than we speak. Calm teaches us how to live, not just how to react.

But storms don’t respect our schedules, and that’s their grim gift. Crisis compresses time and strips away the stories we tell ourselves about what we can’t handle. Under pressure, we discover which values are decorative and which are structural. A storm trains resilience the way a gym trains muscle: by demanding more than comfort would ever request. It can also clarify what matters, because inconvenience is loud, but survival is louder.

Willa Cather, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of the American West, understood landscapes that soothe and landscapes that scald. Her fiction turns harsh weather, hard labor, and quiet perseverance into a study of what a life can endure, and what it can become.

On this October Monday, the practical challenge is to stop ranking our seasons as “good” or “bad.” Treat calm as preparation and storm as instruction: write down what steadies you, practice it before you need it, and when the wind picks up, let it refine your courage instead of erasing it.