Patient Waiting

Patience means waiting. But waiting doesn't necessarily mean not doing. We all understand the former. And yet, few seem to grasp the latter.

There are times when we need to be still and at peace, take a break, and rest from our work, while simply allowing the world its turn to play a role in our endeavors. Every quest for achievement in the world is a partnership with powers that go beyond our own. And often it takes patience to allow our partner to do the work that we can't do alone. We have a phrase, "Watch and Wait." We've done all we can. We've tossed our little toy boat into the stream. Will it float? We await the results.

Waiting. It's something we might do in repose, on a beach, in a hammock, or utterly relaxed in a comfortable chair. We can wait on a yoga mat, or even while taking a nap.

But waiting does not have to be an utterly passive state. It's not the same thing as being inert, frozen, now helpless, and without options for action. "Waiting" is a verb. And it can connote all sorts of different actions. 

Waiting. It's a good time to pray, or play, or otherwise turn away from the focus of activity that has otherwise occupied us. A cook puts a pot on the stove. And then it's the pot's turn to boil. Sometimes, the cook can merely turn away to chat, or check email, or sit and sip coffee while gazing at the garden outside. Waiting can take many forms. And, of course, in some of those forms, the cook can stay quite busy in the kitchen.

Waiting often means preparing.

You've done all that you can do to get the project out there into the potential client's hands. Now, you wait. What does that require? Well, it can mean preparing for the positive go-ahead you hope to receive, and in this way playing a different role in the process, getting yourself ready for the success you want. There will be a next step. So, while you wait, you prepare for whatever is next. Waiting here takes the form of preparation. And at other times, it can mean just turning your attention elsewhere, while allowing the water to heat.

So, in the most general sense, there are two forms of waiting. One does involve resting. But the other involves a different form of doing. Either can help equip you for whatever is to come. But neither will serve you well if it's heavily spiced with hot anxiety. And that, for many people, is the problem. 

You're awaiting a decision. It could go either way. Uncertainty mixed with desire produces anxiety. Or you're awaiting a result that's not uncertain, but is not as yet in hand. Anticipation mixed with desire, or the very different aversion of fear, brings another form of anxiety. There are many ways in which waiting is fraught, tense, and hard. But, fortunately, there are two solutions to any such anxiety.

First, you can emotionally release the situation, whatever it is. Shed it. Let it go. Find a zen peace within. Trust God. Or reconcile yourself to the constant vicissitudes of the cosmos, as the stoics did. They believed that hardly anything is as good as it seems or as bad as it seems, so we should all just calm down. They understood that the discipline of waiting is largely the skill of governing our emotions well. But they also understood something else that's vital.

We all have to learn how to turn our attention from what we can't control to what we can control. And that's often facilitated by engaging in some new, and even slightly different, activity that engages our minds and hearts while we wait. Maybe it's in preparation for the result we want, or the one we'd prefer to avoid, or both. At other times, it's another activity altogether, perhaps one that has nothing to do with the focus of our concern. That doing then becomes a useful and happy distraction that can ease the worry, or the anticipation, which otherwise can be so tough. Action can displace agitation. And action can be the form that waiting takes.

If you have trouble waiting for things, analyze what exactly the problem is, and then take the proper action to solve it. For as you see, action can be just what waiting needs.

Patience

For most of my life, patience has been a monumentally aggravating virtue. I like to make things happen. I like to dream it, do it, and then move on to the next thing. I work hard at projects, and pursue them with determination, persistence, and as much creativity as I can muster. And then I like to see my efforts come together and work, producing the fruit of achievement. I bask in the warm glow of a job well done and go looking for the next one.

When I get excited about an idea or a project, I become a curator of great energy. It seems to come to me from all directions, get inside me, and demand to be used. I surf on it, run with it, and even fly because of it. Then, occasionally, things don't go as expected. Not right away, at least. And sometimes, not even considerably after the "right away" phase has long gone. What's this? The world is not responding to my bright idea and hard work? I'm being made to WAIT?

Patience has a very different energy signature from striving and working hard. For most of my life, I had no real conception of how to make them go together. I was always pushing, running down hallways, making call after call, with almost a frantic pace that finds youth to be such fertile soil. But as I've gotten older, I've come to a bit more of an understanding of patience.

The world is an infinitely complex buzzing web of intersecting interests, energies, and events. It's hard to fit a new idea, or invention, or discovery, into the speeding traffic of what's already on the highway. You sometimes have to sit on the on ramp and patiently wait until the time is right. Then you can safely merge into the stream of ongoing things that are whizzing by.

Impatience doesn't want to wait - ever. But waiting can be just as important an activity as doing. A great baseball player doesn't step up to the plate and let impatience goad him into swinging hard before the pitcher even throws the ball. That would be crazy. And if he even swings a moment too soon, he can miss the opportunity and the ball. Patience is all about acting when the time is right. It's about waiting until the proper moment arrives. It involves the ability to be at peace and give the world time to get ready for your great new idea or project. It's most of all an attitude. And it's powerful.

Impatience is all about ego and that spoiled child inside that wants its way now. Its companions are frustration, irritation, and anger. Patience is a form of inner peace. It's about wisdom. Its companions are serenity and assurance, a confidence that doesn't require immediacy. It isn't in a hurry. It understands that great things take time.

I always wanted to have a better understanding of patience. But I had to wait a long time to get it. It was worth the wait. And most things of value are.

A Slow Start. A Pause. An Improbability.

Some people come into the world like they've been shot out of a cannon. The rest of us, not so much. Some of us are slow starters. It takes us a while to find our path and to get moving along it. And many of us can find ourselves, after a vivid beginning, in an extended time of pause, where our forward momentum seems diminished, or even gone, and we appear stuck. Many of us struggle, to apparently no avail, and come to view any sort of qualitatively different, and better, future as a sadly immense improbability.

But we have to remember how many slow starters and late bloomers have gone on to tremendous success. It's amazing how often a long pause in life's journey has been the prelude to something great. And, ironically, it's astonishing how much the improbable actually happens, all the time, confounding everyone's expectations.

A book review in a recent Sunday New York Times, tells of a young man who wanted to be an artist, and who ended up, in his twenties, in a psychiatric asylum, which did not exactly bode well for his future. And then, when he was released, he seemed to have absolutely no prospects at all. To quote the reviewer:

"A 30-year-old with no money, no job, and no plan, van Gogh retreats to his parents' home."

Yeah. Vincent van Gogh. And the rest, as we love to say, is history.

There are countless such stories in our past. There will be just as many in our future, or more. So, if you feel that you're off to a slow start, in a job, or in life, or you think that destiny has hit the pause button on your career, or for your life, keep hope alive, keep believing, and keep your eyes wide open, looking for the next development that can make all the difference.

Your Starry Night, and next brightly sunlit day, may be just around the corner.

Fly Fishing Lessons for Life

"I've learned a thing or two about human behavior on trout streams. I've discovered that patience serves better than haste, that silence is a virtue, and concentration it's own reward, and that I, at least, like to fish alone; trout fishing should not become a contest." - From Charles Kuralt, America,and his time in Montana.

A friend gave me the book by Charles Kuralt,the great volume just quoted, America, in 1996. I'm just now reading it for the first time and enjoying it immensely. Kuralt had just recently retired from CBS Television where he was such a great teacher. He decided to travel our country, living for a month in each of many different places across the nation. He spends his first month of the new year, January, in New Orleans, then goes to Key West, Florida for a second month. Then he's on to Charleston, SC, and Connecticut, North Carolina, Alaska, Minnesota, Maine, Montana, and other great spots.

What's most amazing about the book are the people he meets and visits along the way, many of whom live in remote circumstances, and enjoy their lives in exemplary ways. The wisdom of ordinary people, and especially those who live outside the mainstream of pop culture, can be extraordinary.

I began with the quote I did because of what it praises:

Patience. Silence. Concentration. Solitude. And acting in a non-competitive way, doing something for its own sake, and for no intrinsic reason.

We need to incorporate more of these things into our lives. When we do so, we'll thrive and flourish, feeling a sense of fulfillment that's nearly impossible amid haste, noise, distraction, and an elbowing, pushing crowd of people trying to get ahead of each other, and us. It's hard to capture these elusive things in our world of hustle and flash. But they will bless us, when we make room for them.

So please remember today the benefits of patience, silence, concentration, solitude, and the rare art of doing for its own sake. Give yourself the room to just be. Then your natural joy, your proper bliss, can bubble forth and bless your spirit, allowing you to go on to bless others, in turn.

PS. And by the way: Search your shelves for some old book you haven't read yet. You may be surprised at what you can find within its covers.

Trust the Process

Every effort toward something important, every quest, every goal-centered pursuit, is a process. And one of the toughest challenges in life is to trust the process as it unfolds.

Good things rarely happen as quickly or as easily as we'd like. Time passes. The horizon recedes. We begin to wonder. Certainly fades into maybe. And our confidence lags, along with other emotions. We're tempted to jump ship, give up, and go on our way.

But this is so common a scenario that we ought to recognize it as such, and approach it differently. Delay is natural in the world. The timing we want is not often the timing we get. So patience is needed, but even more so, trust. We need trust. We need faith. 

There's an old adage (Ok, it's my old adage): Plan your work, and then work your plan. Every good plan needs an investment of trust, of commitment, of hope and realistic optimism.

Then, when the time has fully come, things happen. When the time is right, the process comes to culmination, to fruition, to completion. Would you want it sooner than when the time is right?

If you've chosen the process, if you picked it because you believed in this way of working, then one thing only remains. Trust the process.

Today.

Patience and Waiting

Last time, we began to examine the view that patience is a virtue, by looking at the strengths of patience and the undesirable elements of impatience.

The patient person:

1. Subjectively has inner peace, confidence, and poise

2. Objectively has a calm demeanor and waits, when needed

The impatient person:

1. Subjectively has eagerness, anxiety, frustration, and even anger

2. Objectively has an action orientation, determination, persistence, but can also express frustration and anger

The subjective side of impatience is mostly negative. The objective side looks mostly positive, aside from the negative expression of unpleasant emotions. 

And yet, consider those positive qualities that an impatient person can possess, like a tendency to take action and persist. They can have unfortunate implications in certain situations.  An impatient person may act when waiting is better, and mess up everything in the process.  But then, a patient person may wait when acting is better, and miss an important opportunity in the process. So, what’s it best to be: patient or impatient? 

A virtue, by the way, is by definition a quality or habitual disposition that it’s always good to have. And haven’t we just seen that there are circumstances in which patience and impatience each are bad?

No, actually, not at all. Look again at our characterization of patience, subjectively and objectively. There are no circumstances in which those qualities would be bad to have. The patient person can wait when needed. The only negative sort of example we were able to give assumed waiting when it was both unneeded and counter-productive. The patient person can even share all the objectively positive qualities of the impatient go-getter: that action orientation, the persistence, determination, and even creativity in trying new things in pursuit of a goal. She just does all that with an inner calm that strengthens her and that the impatient person lacks.

Patience does look like a virtue. And impatience looks like a vice. Who needs all that negative emotion? But remember Aristotle's understanding of a virtue. Every virtue has two corresponding vices, a "too little" and a "too much." Connected to patience, the too little is obviously impatience. What's the too much? Clearly the tendency to wait even when waiting is not good, the tendency to simply quit and hope when beneficial action is still needed. We might jokingly say that such a person is "too patient," but that wouldn't literally be true, if patience is indeed a virtue and involves waiting only when it's needed.

So, in the end the only real puzzle is determining when it’s best to wait, and when it’s best to press ahead. And, as I mentioned last time, that requires discernment or wisdom. But more can be said as well. If you're in a situation where you're trying to make something happen, and it's not going as well or quickly as you wanted, you need to know whether to wait a bit longer or to act anew to push things along. You need to ask questions like these:

The Waiting Check List

1. Have I already done all I reasonably think I can do?

2. Is it even a little bit likely that further action would be counterproductive or alienating to others whose goodwill or assistance I might need?

3. Could my timetable itself be unreasonable, and based on insufficient considerations?

4. Am I possibly operating under any false assumptions about the need for things to happen now?

5. Could waiting patiently for a while allow me to do or develop other good things that impatient action would prevent?

If you get at least one "Yes" here, you have an indication that patient waiting might be good. The more affirmative answers, the more likely you should be patient and wait. For at least a while. But we always have to do cost/benefit analyses along the way. Waiting for a day or a week or a month can be desirable in situations where waiting a year or three years may not be, and could even be counterproductive. The more you know about your situation and what you're trying to make happen, the better you'll be able to do such analyses. But always ask yourself questions like these, above. And try to avoid the negative subjectives involved in the impatient mindset. A patient person can act with persistence, determination, and creativity, pushing and reminding, but without the detrimental emotions tied up with impatience. He or she just knows how to release and relax, and maintain the peaceful being that is behind masterful doing over the long run.

Patience, properly understood, can be an important virtue in an active life.