Patience Beholds the Dawn of Finer Things
Amboseli Dawn
We were making pancakes in the kitchen. The syrup was almost made. The pancakes were sizzling in bacon grease. I was jumping up and down, eager anticipation rippling up my spine.
At four and a half, pancake breakfasts
required an extraordinary amount of patience,
for pancakes were my favorite.
Age ten brought a different story. We were gathered around the kitchen table drawing pictures. I needed a certain color of crayon. One of my siblings was using it. I waited awhile and they were still using it. Awhile longer, still using that color. I snapped something awful at them. Mom snapped back at me: “You are so impatient. You need to learn to be more patient.” I was humiliated, furious, then humiliated some more because she was right. I did need to learn patience. I hated it when Mom was right.
Native American Girl
At fourteen, I had developed some patience. Mr. B was teaching 9th grade English at, what for me, was scarcely 8th grade level. Boredom and apathy must have been written all over my face. One day we had a discussion about my boredom, and we decided I should learn to write an essay. He gave me an example that was not very helpful. I wrote an essay with no heart or soul in it but one that mimicked the form of the sample essay. My writing was extremely constricted and obscure, just like the sample essay. Mr. B had me write another essay but this time told me to write about something I cared about.
So I wrote about something I cared passionately about: what had happened to the Native Americans. My spirit soared; I wrote a strong essay. I had waited patiently seven months to do something I loved in English class.
Grief
In college, at 21 years of age, I was studying separation phenomena in a senior psychology seminar. I chose a research topic of death, dying, and bereavement. I wanted to learn everything I could about the topic, so I researched it thoroughly. Some 80+ pages later, I wrote my ticket to graduate school and then presented it to my seminar group. Writing 80+ pages took quite a lot of patience.
But nothing rivaled writing nearly 600 pages for my dissertation at the end of grad school. It was a theoretical dissertation on the vicissitudes of regression, both the maladaptive forms and the adaptive forms in creativity. I sat at my desk hour after hour, day after day, month after month, until it was done. LOTS of patience!
Many Steps
Patience develops. We are not born with it. We develop patience.
The necessities of life, the interactions with others, the development of skills, the acquisition of knowledge, the development of expertise, and the development of the ability to communicate well: these develop patience.
Patience, the capacity to develop patience is selected for over the course of evolution.
Those who develop patience outlast problems, or have the time to solve them. Those who develop patience find they can do things they did not know they could do. People who have patience attain more complex goals. People who develop patience develop the interpersonal skills necessary for caregiving, for teaching, for sustaining long term relationships, for developing complex missions (whatever their field). The development of patience opens the way for long term goals – on a personal level, on a familial level, on a societal level, on a global level.
The development of patience is life-long.
When the Water Flows
Patience opens us to the realms of finer things: creativity, education, scientific endeavor, economic development, learning to love, national and international cooperation, the reach for the proverbial and literal stars. Each of these endeavors requires enormous amounts of patience. It not only requires enormous patience by individuals; it also requires patience across societies. Think about how long it takes to preserve an endangered species, or how long it takes to bring warring nations to peace. Think about how long it takes to develop a prosperous society for all, an educated populace, caring attitudes and behaviors toward the planet. Think about how much patience is required to build a communication network where all opinions are welcomed.
Imagine a world in which these goals are achieved and new goals have been designed. Imagine how many people contributed to these goals, even if they did not live to see them accomplished. Like the mountains that are whittled away slowly, some goals take generations to accomplish. There is a transcendent form of patience that allows us to work diligently toward goals that we will never see achieved ourselves. But we work patiently and diligently toward them, knowing that one day those goals will be met. People’s lives will be better in that day,
The Whittling of Mountains