She laughs. "Well, fortunately I'm a weirdo who likes hard lessons."

"One to keep an eye on, then."

(For more reasons than one.)

She grins and ducks her head a bit.

(...Cute girl.)

"What sort of hard lessons do the Jedi teach?"

...Hum. "There's advanced stuff of course, but the - stuff that's actually hard to accept you need to learn... Self control's a big one. Knowing yourself - what you value, what you want from yourself, what your goals are, and why they're your goals. Admitting when you've acted out of alignment with those, and then trying to do better. That one... That's the hardest for me, by a lot."

"Sounds very... philosophical."

"I mean, real philosophy is just - the life you live, the life you want to live, and how you'd describe it. Many people just abstract everything concrete away until nonsense sounds plausible and sense sounds bad."

"But if I'm - like, if I'm trying to write a budget, and I keep failing, then I'm not succeeding at my goals, and I need to sit down and identify why I'm doing this, what I want out of it, how I'd get that - and what I'm doing wrong, since I'm not getting what I want. And if there's tradeoffs, I'll want to know what those actually are and what they're actually worth."

"And you have to remove your own ego from how you judge the world if you want to actually do that, right?"

"Like, if you sit there insisting that you're very excellent at budgets, and this budget just keeps failing to balance or getting rejected because everyone else is an idiot with terrible priorities and this budget software is badly designed and this form is dumb, and it'd all be better if everyone magically listened to you and designed things correctly - it doesn't even really matter if that's all true or not, because if you sit there waiting for people to magically realize you've been right all along and they should acknowledge your brilliance and stop arguing with you, you're going to be sitting there a very long time. And if you keep not achieving your goals, you're not as good at this as you think you are."

"Cogently stated. Your self is what you can control, so one should ensure that they do."

Grin! "Yeah. And self control is hard."

"Would you give that talk to my interns? It would do them good to hear, I think."

She laughs. "Give me a little bit to polish it, but I'd be happy to help out."

"Excellent."

"Serving the Republic is a Jedi's duty."

"Then on behalf of the Republic, thank you."

Giggle. "You're welcome."

Smile, and she draws the conversation into more about Anakin's training with the Jedi.

Which she's pretty happy to chatter at length about - though she does respond with her own questions about Elesse's work. 

Elesse is more than willing to answer Anakin's questions as well. Curiosity is a good look on her.

Good! 

Anakin can keep this up until pretty late in the evening - and she seems to have forgotten that humans generally need to eat, too.

The nice thing about traveling with a staff is that it's someone's job to remember when meals are, and to bring the meals to them.

Anakin also needs to be poked into eating instead of letting her food go cold (though her teacher seems pretty used to providing gentle reminders).

Elesse might have to insist they take a break to eat, then. She pays the cook very well, and it would be almost criminal to waste his efforts.

Alright...

Elesse will be stopping to eat, anyway, even if Anakin doesn't.

Since everyone's insisting...