‘Never pray for patience.’
Did you ever receive this advice? I remember hearing it as a child—and when I asked ‘Why not?’ I was told something like, ‘because all that will happen are situations guaranteed to make you impatient.’
Being a sensible child, can you guess the one thing I never prayed for? Absolutely right: Patience. If that was all it took to keep life sailing smoothly, why invite disaster? Life was already full of things to feel impatient about. Long car drives. Waiting at all the places that we drove to. Waiting for the adults to stop talking. Waiting to go home. Waiting for dinner. Waiting for dessert. Waiting for summer vacation. Waiting for Christmas. Waiting for birthdays. Waiting to grow old enough so that I could stop waiting.
I hate to break the news to any young readers, but I still haven’t been able to stop waiting. I just wait for different things now and since I am an adult, I’m not allowed to jump up and down and whine about them. Bummer. I could use a good bit of whining.
Couldn’t we all? Life just seems to get harder and harder and our only recourse is our least favorite advice: be patient. Patient? Patient?! How much more patient do I need to be? Will that really solve my problems, being patient? No. But I suspect it’ll make everyone’s lives around me a lot easier. But is that the only reason we should be patient: because it is a social construct?
When you were a kid, what was the best part of Christmas? The presents? The food/candy? (seeing relatives is more of an adult joy, but we’ll give it an honorable mention). I’ll admit that for me it was always the presents. I was one greedy little child and I loved being given things. At some point however, I realized that presents weren’t living up to my expectations anymore. Not that they still weren’t wonderful—they just weren’t as wonderful as I always wanted them to be. There was no perfect present that could keep me interested and happy to match the amount of time that I spent anticipating the presents I received. It dawned on me that I was enjoying the idea of Christmas far more than the reality of it.
Perhaps this should have ruined Christmas for me. But for some strange reason I think I started enjoying Christmas even more. Christmas and my Birthday, to the sometimes amusement and sometimes over-patient bemusement of my parents. Because now that I knew the real fun was in anticipation, I made sure to milk as much anticipation as possible. I would start counting down months in advance of my birthday, getting a thrill of glee each time I said the words:
‘Dad, Dad, guess what?’
‘What?’ (imagine a world weary exasperated sigh)
‘It’s 89 days till my birthday!’
‘Oh, wow, is it?’
Seriously, best Dad ever. He plays along with me every year. :)
Hold on a minute, though. We were talking about patience: is anticipation really the same thing? Could you have one without the other? You can anticipate something with impatience, as well as with patience, so maybe not. But I think that anticipation is far more fun if you’re at least a little patient. Impatience ruins the fun of it, because you can’t enjoy the moment when you’re impatient. You’re always looking ahead, looking for the big thing coming up; and you miss what’s right there in front of you. Whereas if you are (at least mostly) patiently anticipating something, you never lose sight of the excitement that will be, while still maintaining enjoyment of the now.
I believe it is a grand thing to enjoy ‘what will be’ before it happens, because no matter what happens after, you just spent so much time being happy about it that even if the moment doesn’t live up to expectations you had all that time enjoying it already.
One day of a good Birthday still equals only one day.
Three months of anticipating that Birthday equals three months of happiness.
Mmm, good math.
But this idea of waiting for the good things in life seems to have faded out of style along with poodle skirts and mullets. We are the instantaneous generation. We have our computers and our iphones (or droids/blackberries/etc) at our fingertips constantly: we are never out of touch with the rest of the world. Have a question? Just consult the internet, you’ll find the answer in less than five minutes. There’s no more waiting, isn’t that great? I don’t know.
I don’t mean to sound down on modern technology. I love my computer. I love the internet. Cell phones are great. Having all the knowledge you could ever want at your fingertips can be thrilling. All the things we can think!
But—
But.
What is it doing to us? What are the consequences? Do we care?
I do. Call me old fashioned, but if I’m taking the time to be with a friend, I don’t want them to be ignoring me in favor of their cell phone, no matter how many texts they’re getting or posts on their facebook wall. We’re never truly ‘with’ people anymore, because we’re carrying around the entire world with us wherever we go.
Everything is getting faster. (people keep saying that, I know, I know). We don’t even take the time to speak full words anymore: why do that when you can say everything with a couple letters? Lol. Rofl. Asap. Brb. G2g. We don’t even have the patience to think anymore. Thinking takes too much time; the world is moving too fast for us to think about it. Have to keep up!
We have lost the art of waiting. We have lost the ability to be patient when nothing is happening. In some ways it’s not our fault—not anyone’s fault. Our world moves so fast we never have the time to be impatient with the dead space because there’s so little of it. But when there is that five second gap—hoowee. The long and short is that we panic. We don’t know what to do with silence, because the only thing that’s there other than silence…is us. And if we’ve never had the time to get to know ourselves and be comfortable with who we are…man, that is one awkward silence. Even worse than an office party.
The reason I object to our fastfastfast culture is that it takes away our ability to be. Be what? Be ourselves mostly. People complain and complain about how shallow our culture is—newsflash, a culture is defined by its people, and we are shallow people. We’ve never been taught how to be anything else. We’ve never had the time to be anything else.
But we could. We really could be so much better than we are. But it all starts with waiting, with patience, with anticipation. With time. And above all, a little bit of silence.
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